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D ANTON 

A STUDY 



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ANTON 



A STUDY 



BY 



ILAIRE BELLOC, B.A. 

LATE BRACKENBURY SCHOLAR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, 
OXFORD 



IRew ©orft 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1899 



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PREFACE 



An historian of just pre-eminence in his university and 
college, in a httle work which should be more widely- 
known, has summed up the two principal characters of 
the Revolution in the following phrases : " the cold and 
ferocious Robespierre, the blatant Danton." ^ The judg- 
ment is precipitate and is tinged with a certain bias. 

An authority of still greater position prefaces his note- 
book on the Revolution by telling us that he is going 
to describe the beast.^ The learned sectarian does not 
conceal from his readers the fact that a profound analysis 
had led to a very pronounced conviction. So certain is 
he of his ground, that he treats with equal consideration 
the evidence of printed documents, of autograph letters, 
and of a chance stranger speaking in a country inn of 
a thing that had happened forty years before. 

The greatest of French novelists and a principal poet 
has given us in " Quatre-vingt-treize " a picture moving 
and living. Yet even in that work much is admitted, for 
the sake of contrast and colour, which no contemporary 
saw. The dialogue between Danton and Marat, with its 
picturesque untruths, is an example.^ 

If facts so conflicting be stated as true by men of 
such various calibre, it would seem a very difficult task 
to write history at all. Yet there is a method which 

1 0. W. Oman, "History of England," p. 581. 

2 Taine, " La Revolution," preface. 

* Victor Hugo, "Quatre-vingt-treize." Illustrated edition of 1877. 
Faris, pp. 136-150. 

Vii 



viii PREFACE 

neither excludes personal conviction, nor necessitates the 
art of deceit, nor presupposes a primitive ignorance. 

It is to ascertain what is positively known and can be 
proved, and with the facts so gathered — only with these — 
to paint a picture as vivid as may be; on a series of 
truths — with research it grows to respectable proportions — 
to base a conviction, general, wide, and capable of constant 
application, as to the character of a period or of a man. 

Such was the method of Fustel de Coulanges, and on 
his model there has arisen from the minute, the some- 
times pedantic accuracy of French scholars, a school 
which is the strongest in Europe. 

The method I have been describing has also this 
advantage, that the least learned may enter upon such a 
path without confusion and may progress, and that a 
book of no pretensions can yet, by following these rules, 
at least avoid untruth. With inferior tools, and on an 
over-rough plan, I shall yet attempt in this life of Danton 
to follow the example. 

The motto which is printed at the head of this book, 
and which is borrowed from the most just of biographers, 
must give a note to the whole of my description. What 
was the movement which founded our modern society? 
what were its motives, its causes of action, its material 
surroundings ? And what was the man who, above all 
others, represented that spirit at its most critical moment ? 

To find a right answer to such questions it is necessary 
to do two things. 

First, we must make the sequence of cause and effect 
reasonable. In giving an explanation or in supposing a 
motive, we must present that which rational men, un- 
biassed, will admit. To put in the same character irre- 
concilable extremes is to leave no picture. To state a 
number of facts so that no thread connects them, so that 
they surprise by contrast but leave only confusion in the 
mind, is a kind of falsehood. It is the method most 



PREFACE ix 

adopted by partisans; they frame a theory upon the 
lines of which such and such facts will lie, but they omit, 
or only mention as anomalies, facts which are equally 
true, but which would vitiate their conclusions. We must 
(to use a mathematical metaphor) integrate the differen- 
tials of history ; make a complete and harmonious whole 
of a hundred aspects ; strike a curve which shall unite in 
a regular fashion what has appeared as a number of 
scattered points. Till we can say, " This man — seeing all 
his character and innumerable known acts — could not have 
acted as such and such a report would have us believe ; " 
or again, till we can say, " This epoch, with its convictions, 
its environment, its hterature, could not have felt the 
emotions which such and such an historian lends it," — 
till we can say this, we do not understand a personality 
or a period. ^ 

In the second place, we must recognise in all repeated 
and common expressions of conviction, and in all the 
motives of a time of action, some really existing ideal. 
There was a conviction common to many thousands of 
Parliamentarians in the earlier stages of the EngHsh Civil 
War. There was a genuine creed in the breasts of the 
well-paid Ironsides of its later period. There was a real 
loyalty and an explicable theory of kingship in the camp 
of Charles the First. 

So in the period of which we deal there was a clear 
doctrine of poHtical right, held by probably the strongest 
intellects, and defended by certainly the most sustained 
and enthusiastic courage that ever adorned a European 
nation. We must recognise the soul of a time. For 
were there not a real necessity for sympathy with a 
period which we study, were it possible for us to see 
entirely from without, with no attempt to apprehend 
from within, then of many stupendous passages in history 
we should have to assert that all those who led were 
scoundrels, that all their lives were (every moment of 



X PREFACE 

them) a continuous piece of consummate acting; tliat 
our enemies, in fine, were something greater and more 
■wicked than men. We should have to premise that all 
the vigour belonged to the bad, and all the ineptitude to 
the good, and separate humanity into two groups, one of 
righteous imbeciles, and the other of genius sold to hell. 
No one would wish, or would be sincerely able to place 
himself in either category. 

We must postulate, then, of the Revolution that which 
Taine ridiculed, that for which Michelet lived, and that 
which Carlyle never grasped — the Revolutionary idea. 
And we must read into the lives of all the actors in that 
drama, and especially of the subject of this book, some 
general motive which is connected with the creed of the 
time. We must make his actions show as a consonant 
whole — as a man's — and then, if possible, determine his 
place in what was not an anarchic explosion, but a regular, 
though a vigorous and exceedingly rapid development. 

A hundred difficulties are at once apparent in under- 
taking a work of this nature. It is not possible to give 
a detailed history of the Revolution, and yet many facts 
of secondary importance must be alluded to. It is neces- 
sary to tell the story of a man whose action and interest, 
nay, whose whole life, so far as we know it, lies in less 
than five years. 

Danton's earlier life is but a fragmentary record, col- 
lected by several historians with extreme care, and only 
collected that it may supplement our knowledge of his 
mature career. The most laborious efforts of his bio- 
graphers have found but a meagre handful of the facts 
for which they searched; nor does any personal inquiry 
at his birthplace, from what is left of his family or in 
his papers, augment the materials : the research has been 
thoroughly and finally made before this date, and its 
results, such as they are, I have put together in the 
second chapter of this book. 



PREFACE xi 

He does not even, as do Kobespierre, Mirabeau, and 
others, occupy the stage of the Kevolution from the first. 

Till the nation is attacked, his role is of secondary 
importance. We have glimpses more numerous indeed/ 
and more important, of his action after than before 1789. 
But it is only in the saving of France, when the men of 
action were needed, that he leaps to the front. Then, 
suddenly, the whole nation and its story becomes filled 
with his name. For thirteen months, from that loth of 
August 1792, which he made, to the early autumn of the 
following year, Danton, his spirit, his energy, his practical 
grasp of things as they were, formed the strength of 
France. While the theorists, from whom he so pro- 
foundly differed, were wasting themselves in a kind of 
political introspection, he raised the armies. When the 
orators could only find great phrases to lead the rage 
against Dumouriez' treason, he formed the Committee to 
be a dictator for a falling nation. All that was useful in 
the Terror was his work ; and if we trace to their very 
roots the actions that swept the field and left it ready 
for rapid organisation and defence, then at the roots we 
nearly always find his masterful and sure guidance. 

There are in the Revolution two features, one of 
which is almost peculiar to itself, the other of which is 
in common with all other great crises in history. 

The first of these is that it used new men and young 
men, and comparatively unknown men, to do its best 
work. If ever a nation called out men as they were, 
apart from family, from tradition, from wealth, and from 
known environment, it was France in the Revolution. 
The national need appears at that time like a captain in 
front of his men in a conscript army. He knows them 
each by their powers, character, and conduct. But they 
are in uniform ; he cares nothing for their family or their 
youth; he makes them do that for which each is best 
fitted. This feature makes the period unique, and it is 



xii PREFACE 

due to this feature tliat so many of the Revolutionary 
men have no history for us before the Revolution. It is 
this feature which makes their biographies a vividly con- 
centrated account of action in months rather than in 
years. They come out of obscurity, they pass through 
the intense zone of a search-light; they are suddenly 
eclipsed upon its fm-ther side. 

The second of these features is common to all moments 
of crisis. Months in the Revolution count as years, and 
this furnishes our excuse for giving as a biography so 
short a space in a man's life. But it is just so to do. 
In every history a group of years at the most, sometimes 
a year alone, is the time to be studied day by day. In 
comparison with the intense purpose of a moment whole 
centuries are sometimes colourless. 

Thus in the political history of the English thirteenth 
century, the little space from the Provisions of Oxford 
to the battle of Evesham is everything; in the study 
of England's breach with the Continental tradition, the 
period between the Ridolphi plot and the Armada; in 
the formation of the English oligarchy, the crisis of April 
to December 1688. 

This second feature, the necessity for concentration, 
would excuse a special insistence on the two years of 
Danton's prominence, even if his youth were better known. 
The two conditions combined make imperative such a 
treatment as I have attempted to follow. 

As to authorities, three men claim my especial grati- 
tude, for the work in this book is merely a rearrangement 
of the materials they have collected. They are Dr. Bou- 
geart, who is dead (and his clear Republicanism brought 
upon him exile and persecution) ; M. Aulard, the greatest 
of our living writers on the Revolutionary period ; and 
Dr. Robinet, to whose personal kindness, interest, and 
fruitful suggestion I largely owe this book. The keeper 
of the Carnavalet has been throughout his long and 



PREFACE xiii 

laborious life tlie patient biographer of Danton, and little 
can now be added to the research which has been the 
constant occupation of a just and eminent career. 

We must hope, in spite of his great age, to have from 
his hands some further work; for he is one of those 
many men who have given to the modern historical 
school of France, amid all our modern verbiage and com- 
promise, the strength of a voice that speaks the simple 
truth. 



CONTENTS 



tHAP. ^^"^^^ 

PREFACE . . vii 

I. THE REVOLUTION I 

II. THE YOUTH OF DANTON 40 

III. D ANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 57 

IV. THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 114 

V. THE REPUBLIC ........ I?' 

VL THE TERROR 211 

vn. THE DEATH OF DANTON 249 

VIII. ROBESPIERRE . . . 282 

APPENDICES— 

I, NOTE ON THE CORDELIERS 321 

n, NOTE ON CERTAIN SITES MENTIONED IN THIS BOOK 327 
III. NOTE ON THE SUPPOSED VENALITY OF DANTON . 33 1 
IV. NOTE ON DANTON'S RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MAS- 
SACRES OF SEPTEMBER 34O 

V. SHORT MEMOIR BY A. R. C. DE ST. ALBIN . . 347 
VI. EXTRACTS SHOWING REIMBURSEMENT OF DANTON'S 

OFFICE . 365 

VII. EXTRACTS CONCERNING DANTON'S HOUSEHOLD. . 373 

VIII. CATALOGUE OP DANTON'S LIBRARY .... 380 

IX. EXTRACTS FROM THE MEMOIR WRITTEN IN 1 846 BY 

THE SONS OF DANTON ...... 3^4 

X. NOTES OF TOPINO-LEBRUN, JUROR OF THE REVOLU- 
TIONARY TRIBUNAL 395 

XI. REPORT OP THE FIRST COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC 

SAFETY 403 

INDEX. 430 

XV 



THE 

LIFE OF DANTON 

CHAPTER I 

THE REVOLUTION 

Before writing a life of Danton in English, it is necessary 
to do three things. First, to take a definite point of 
view with regard to the whole revolutionary movement; 
secondly, to explain, so far as is possible, the form which 
it took in France; thirdly, to show where Danton stood 
in the scheme of events, the nature of his personality, 
the effects of his brief action. This triple task is neces- 
sary to a book which, but for it, would be only a string 
of events, always confused, often without meaning. 

What was the Eevolution ? It was essentially a 
reversion to the normal — a sudden and violent return to 
those conditions which are the necessary bases of health 
in any political community, which are clearly apparent in 
every primitive society, and from which Europe had been 
estranged by an increasing complexity and a spirit of 
routine. 

It has never been denied that the process of gradual 
remoulding is a part of living, and all admit that the 
State (which lives like any other thing) must suffer 
such a process as a condition of health. There is 
in every branch of social effort a necessity for constant 

A 



2 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

reform and clieck : it is apparent to tlie administrator of 
every kind : it is the business of a politician continually 
to direct and apply such correction : — the whole body of 
the law of England is a collection of the past results of 
this guiding force. 

But what are the laws that govern it ? What is the 
nature of the condition that makes reform imperative ? 
What distinguishes the good from the bad in the matter 
of voluntary change, and separates the conservative from 
the destructive effort ? 

It is in the examination of this problem that we may 
discover how great a debt the last century owed to nature 
— a debt which demanded an immediate liquidation, and 
was often only paid at the expense of violence. 

It would seem that the necessity of reform arises 
from this, that our ideas, which are eternal, find them- 
selves expressed in phrases and resulting in actions which 
belong to material environment — an environment, there- 
fore, that perpetually changes in form. It is not to be 
admitted that the innermost standards of the soul can 
change ; if they could, the word " reform " would lose all 
moral meaning, and a thing not being good would cease 
to be desired. But the meaning of words, the effect 
on the senses of certain acts, the causes of pleasure 
and pain in a society, the definition of nationality — all 
these things of their nature change without ceasing, and 
must as ceaselessly be brought into accordance with the 
unchanging mind. 

What test can be applied by which we may know 
whether a reform is working towards this rectification 
or not ? None, except the general conviction of a whole 
generation that this or that survival obstructs the way 
of right living, the mere instinct of justice expressed in 
concrete terms on a particular point. It is by this that 
the just man of any period feels himself bound. This 
is not a formula : it seems a direction of the loosest and 



THE REVOLUTION 3 

of the most useless kind ; and yet to observe it is to keep 
the State sane, to neglect it is to bring about revolution. 
This much is sure, that where there exists in a State a 
body of men who are determined to be guided by this 
vague sense of justice, and who are in sufficient power 
to let it frame their reforms, then these men save a State 
and keep it whole. When, on the contrary, those who 
make or administer the laws are determined to abide by 
a phrase or a form, then the necessities accumulate, the 
burden and the strain become intolerable, and the gravi- 
tation towards the normal standard of living, which should 
act as a slight but permanent force, acts suddenly at a 
high potential and with destructive violence. 

As an example of the time when the former and the 
better conditions prevailed, I would cite the period be- 
tween the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, when a 
change of the most fundamental kind passed over the 
society of Europe, indeed a change from barbarism to 
civilisation, and yet the whole went well. Keform, being 
continual, was easy. New institutions, the Parliaments, 
the Universities, the personal tax, rose as they were 
demanded, and the great transition was crowned with 
the security and content that surrounded St. Louis. 
Simplicity, that main condition of happiness, was the 
governing virtue of the time. The king ruled, the knight 
fought, the peasant dug in his own ground, and the priest 
believed. 

It is the lack of simplicity that makes of the three 
centuries following the fifteenth (with vices due perhaps 
to the wickedness of the fifteenth) an opposite example. 
Every kind of phrase, emblem, or cloak is kept; every 
kind of living thing is sacrificed. Conditions cease to 
be flexible, and the body of Europe, which after all still 
breathes, is shut in with the bonds of the lawyers, and all 
but stifled. 

In the sixteenth century one would say that the 



4 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

political quarrels of tlie princes were a mere insult to 
nature, but the people, though they are declining, show 
that they still exist; the passions of their religions 
enliven the dead game of the Tudors and the Valois. 
In the seventeenth the pedants give their orders, the 
upper classes fight the princes, the people are all but 
silent. Where were they in the Fronde, or in that less 
heroic struggle the Parliamentary Wars ? As the 
eighteenth century falls further and further into decay 
all is gone ; those who move in comfort above the souls 
which they have beneath them for a pavement, the rich 
and the privileged, have even ceased to enjoy their 
political and theological amusements ; they are concerned 
only with maintaining their ease, and to do this they 
conjure with the name of the people's memories. 

They build ramparts of sacred tombs, and defend 
themselves with the bones of the Middle Ages, with the 
relics of the saint and the knight. 

It is this which necessitates and moulds the Revolu- 
tion. The privileged men, the lawyers especially, held to 
the phrase. They excused themselves in a time most 
artificial by quoting the formulae of a time when life was 
most natural and when the soul was nearest the surface. 
They used the name of the Middle Ages precisely because 
they thought the Middle Ages were dead, when suddenly 
the spirit of the Middle Ages, the spirit of enthusiasm 
and of faith, the Crusade, came out of the tomb and 
routed them. 

I say, then, that the great disease of the time preced- 
mg the Revolution came from the fact that it had kept 
the letter and forgotten the spirit. It continued to do 
the same things as Europe at its best — it had entirely 
neglected to nourish similar motives. Let me give an 
extreme example. There are conditions under which to 
burn a man to death seems admissible and just. When 
ofifences often occur which society finds heinous beyond 



THE REVOLUTION 5 

•words, then no punisliment seems sufficient for tlie satis- 
faction of the emotion which the crime arouses. Thus 
during the Middle Ages (especially in the latter part 
of their decay), and sometimes in the United States 
to-day, a man is burned at the stake. But there are 
other conditions under which a society shrinks with 
the greatest horror from such a punishment. Security 
is so well established, conviction in this or that so 
much less firm, the danger from the criminal so much 
less menacing, that the idea of such an extreme agony 
revolts all men. Then to burn is wrong, because it is 
unnecessary and undesired. But let us suppose the 
lawyers to be bent on a formula, tenacious from habit 
and become angrily tenacious from opposition, saying that 
what has been shall be ; and what happens ? The Parlia- 
ment of Strasbourg condemns a man to be burnt while 
the States General are actually in session in 1789 ! 

Again, take the example of the land. There was a 
time when the relations of lord and serf satisfied the 
heart. The village was a co-operative community: it 
needed a protector and a head. Even when such a need 
was not felt, the presence of a political personage, at the 
cost of a regular and slight tax, the natural affection which 
long habit had towards a family and a name — these made 
the relation not tolerable, but good. But when change 
had conquered even the permanent manorial unit, and the 
serf owned severally, tilling his private field; when the 
political position of the lord had disappeared, and when 
the personal tie had been completely forgotten — then the 
tax was folly. It was no longer the symbol of tenure 
drawn in a convenient fashion, taken right out of the corn- 
field from a primitive group of families ; it had become an 
arbitrary levy, drawn at the most inconvenient time, 
upsetting the market and the harvest, and falling on a 
small farmer who worked painfully at his own plot of 
ground. 



6 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

It is difficult to explaiQ to English readers how far 
this deadening conservatism had been pushed on the 
Continent. The constitution of England and the habits 
of her lawyers and politicians were still, for all their vices, 
the most flexible in Europe. Even Pitt could tinker at 
the representative system, and an abominable penal code 
could be softened without upsetting the whole scheme of 
English criminal law. To this day we notice in England 
the most fundamental changes introduced, so to speak, 
into an unresisting medium : witness those miniature 
revolutions, the Income Tax and Employers' Liability, 
which are so silent, and which yet produce results so 
immeasurable. 

It has always been a difficulty in writing of the 
Revolution for English readers, that in England the 
tendency to reform, though strong, was not irresistible. 
It was a desire, but it was not a necessity, and that on 
account of the quality which has just been mentioned, 
the lack of form and definition in the English constitu- 
tion and legal habit. 

But if we go a little deeper we shall see a further 
cause. Nothing will so deaden the common sense of 
justice in a legislator or a lawyer, nothing will separate 
him so much from the general feeling of his time, as 
distinction of class from class. When a man cannot fre- 
quently meet and sympathise with every kind of man 
about him, then the State lacks homogeneity ; the general 
sentiment is unexpressed, because it has no common organ 
of expression, and you obtain in laws and legal decisions 
not the living movement of the citizens, but the dead 
traditions of a few. 

Now by a peculiar bent of history, the stratification 
of society which is so natural a result of an old civilisa- 
tion, was less marked in England than elsewhere in 
Europe. The society of the Continent is not more homo- 
geneous to-day, as contrasted with that of modern Eng- 



THE REVOLUTION 7 

land, than was the society of England a hundred years 
ago, as contrasted with that of the Continent then ; and 
any English traveller who is wise enough to note in our 
time the universal type of citizen in France, will ex- 
perience something of the envy that Frenchmen felt 
when they noted the solid England of the eighteenth 
century. There great lawyers were occasionally drawn 
from the people ; there a whole mass of small proprietors 
in land or capital — half the people perhaps — kept the 
balance of the State, and there a fluctuating political 
system could, for all its corruption, find a place for the 
young bourgeois Wolfe to defeat the great gentleman 
Montcalm. 

But while in England reform was possible (though 
perhaps it has been fatally inadequate), in the rest of 
Europe it was past all hope. Everywhere there must be 
organs of government, and these on the Continent could 
no longer be changed, whether for better or worse : they 
had become stiff with age, and had to be supplanted. 
Now to supplant the fundamental organs of govern- 
ment, to make absolutely new laws and to provide an 
absolutely new machinery — all this is to produce a violent 
revolution. 

You could not reform such a body as the Chatelet, 
nor replace by a series of statutes or of decisions such a 
mass as the local coutumes. Not even a radical change 
in the system of taxation would have made the noblesse 
tolerable ; no amount of personal energy nor any excellence 
of advisers could save a king enveloped with the mass 
of etiquette at Versailles. These numerous symptoms of 
the lethargy that had overtaken European society, even 
the disease itself, might have been swept away by a sharp 
series of vigorous reforms. Indeed, some of these reforms 
were talked of, and a few actually begun in the garrulous 
courts of Berlin and of St. Petersburg. Such reforms 
would have merited, and would have obtained, the name 



8 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

of Revolution, but they miglit have passed without that 
character of accompanying excess which has delayed upon 
every side the liberties of Europe. We should be talking 
of the old regime and of the Revolution as we do now, 
but the words would have called up a struggle between 
old Parliaments and young legists, between worn-out 
customs and new codes, between the kings of etiquette 
and the kings of originality, between sleep and the new 
science; the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries 
would have been united by some curious bridge — not 
separated by an abyss. 

As it is, the word Revolution recalls scenes almost as 
violent as those which marked the transition of Rome 
from the Republic to the Empire. We remember the 
name not of Condorcet but of Marat: in place of the divided 
Europe and complicated struggle which (on the analogy 
of the Reformation) should have attended a movement 
upon which sympathy was so evenly divided, in place 
of a series of long, desultory campaigns, you have a 
violent shock of battle between the French and every 
government in Europe ; you have the world outlawing 
a people ; you have, as a direct consequence of such a 
pressure, the creation of a focus from whose extreme heat 
proceeds the conquering energy of Napoleon. Blows 
terrible and unexpected are struck in the first four years 
of the war, and there appears in 1796 a portent — the 
sword that was not broken until it had cut down and 
killed the old society of the West. 

To all these accidents which flow from the form the 
Revolution took, one more must be added, and that the 
most important. The shock was of such violence that 
all the old bonds broke. I mean the permanent things 
which hold society together, not the dead relics, which 
would in any case have disappeared. 

Many great changes have passed over Europe and 
have left the fundamentals untouched; the Revolution, 



THE REVOLUTION 9 

which miglit so easily have remoulded the shape of 
society, did more and possibly worse : it rebuilt from the 
foundations. How many unquestioned dogmas were 
suddenly brought out into broad daylight ! All our 
modern indecision, our confused philosophies, our in- 
numerable doubts, spring from that stirring of the 
depths. Is property a right ? May men own land ? Is 
marriage sacred ? Have we duties to the State, to the 
family ? All these questions begin to be raised. A 
German Pole has denied the sequence of cause and effect. 
Occasionally a man suddenly rises and asks, " Is there a 
God ? " There is nothing left in reserve for the amuse- 
ment of posterity. 

Well, this unexampled violence, which, like the 
wind on the Red Sea, has bared for a moment things 
that had lain hidden for centuries — this war of twenty 
years and its results were due to the fact that the 
Revolution, which might have started in a different 
form from almost any European centre, started as fact 
from France. 

That France was the agent of the reform is the 
leading condition of the whole story, for it was her 
centralisation that made the change so rapid and so 
effectual, her temperament that framed the abstract for- 
mulae which could spread like a religion, her political 
position in Europe that led to the crusade against her; 
and this war in its turn (acting on a Paris that led and 
governed the nation) produced all the further conse- 
quences of the Revolution from the Terror to Waterloo. 

Let us examine the conditions of the Revolution as a 
purely French thing, see what it was that made it break 
out when it did, what guided its course, what gave Paris 
its position, what led to the wars and the Terror. 

In the first place, the causes of the Revolutionary 
movement in France. They were two : First, the imme- 
diate material necessity for reform which coincided with 



lo THE LIFE OF DANTON 

the Revolutionary period ; secondly, tlie philosopiiy wliich 
had permeated society for a generation, and which, when 
once a change was undertaken, guided and controlled the 
development of that change. 

As for the material circumstances that led to so 
urgent a necessity for reform, they may be stated as 
follows: — The governmental machinery, which had been 
growing more and more inefficient, had finally broken 
down ; and this failure had been accelerated by a series 
of natural accidents, the most prominent among them 
being two successive years of scarcity. 

Now why was France alone in such a deplorable 
condition ? Why was she all but bankrupt, her navy in 
rapid decay, her armies ill-clothed, ill-fed, in arrears of 
pay ? Why could Arthur Young, observant, honest, and 
inept, make his tour through France (in which the mass 
of accurate detail is balanced by so astounding a mis- 
conception of French society^), and in that book describe 
the land going out of cultivation, the peasant living on 
grass, the houses falling down, the roads impassable ? 
The answer is discovered in the very causes that led to 
the past greatness of the country. Because France alone 
in Europe was a vast centralised body — a quality which 
had made the reign of Louis XIV.; because centralisation 
could not continue to work under the old regime — a 
condition which led to the abrupt wreck of 1788 and 
,1789. 

The government of France, in the century preceding 
the Revolution, might be compared to a great machine 
made with admirable skill out of the disjointed parts of 
smaller engines ; a machine whose designer had kept but 
a single end in view — the control of all the works by one 
lever in the hand of one man. But (to continue the 

^ E.g. he says the " gentry " of France should imitate the gentry of 
England. But to do this it is necessary to own the houses of the 
peasantry; and even then the system does not always suit the Celtic 
temperament, they say. 



THE REVOLUTION ii 

metaplior) the materials to whicli Ms effort had been 
confined forbade simplicity ; the parts would be repaired 
with, difficulty, or sometimes not at all ; the cleaning and 
oiling of the bearings was neglected, of necessity, on 
account of their position; and after two generations of 
work the machine had ceased its functions. It was 
clogged upon every side and rusty — still dependent upon 
one lever, but incapable of movement. 

France had become a despotism, but a despotism 
which lacked organisation ; all centred in the king, with 
the result that none could act but he, and yet, when he 
strove to act, the organs of action were useless. All had 
been made dependent upon one fountain-head, yet every 
channel was stopped up. 

It is of the utmost importance in studying the 
Revolution to appreciate this fact: that nearly every 
part of the national life was sound, with the exception 
of the one supreme function of government. I do not 
mean that France and the world needed no new ideas, 
nor that a material change in the form of the executive 
would have sufficed for society. But I mean that, more 
than is usually the case in a time of crisis, a political act 
was the supreme need of the moment. 

Capital was not well distributed, but at least it was 
not centralised as it is in our modern industrial societies. 
All men owned; the peasant was miserable beyond 
words, but his misery was not the result of an " Economic 
Law ; " it was due to that much more tangible thing, mis- 
government. The citizen was apathetic, but potentially 
he was vigorous and alert. If he knew nothing of the 
jury or of public discussion, it was the system oppressing 
the man, not the man creating, or even permitting, the 
system. In a word, the vices or the misfortunes of 
France were not to be traced to the character of the 
social system or of the national temper. They were to 
be found in an artificial centre, the Government. 



12 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Now of all governments a pure despotism can most 
quickly establish reforms. In Russia the serfs were 
freed, the Jews expelled, by a stroke of the pen; in 
India you may see great financial experiments, great 
military groups, come into being almost simultaneously 
with the decision that creates them. Why could not 
the central government have saved France ? Because on 
every side its action was deadened by dead things, which 
it pretended were alive; because throughout the pro- 
vinces and towns there lay thick the corpses of what had 
once been local institutions, and because so far from the 
Crown removing these, it had left to them the privileges 
which at one time were the salaries of their activity, 
but which had now become a kind of bribe to continue 
inactive. 

How had this come about ? How had a government 
been developed whose note was centralisation and despo- 
tism, and which yet carefully preserved the fossils of local 
administration ? 

To answer that question it is necessary to consider 
the original matter of which French society was com- 
posed and the influences that modified without destroy- 
ing this matter in the course of the Middle Ages. The 
French, like every other national group in Western 
Europe, may be said to have differentiated from the 
mere ruins of the Empire in that dark period which 
follows the death of Charlemagne ; until that epoch 
some shadow of unity remained, and certainly the forces 
working against unity had not yet begun to be national. 
The order of Rome, which had remained as an accepted 
ideal for five hundred years, takes under Charlemagne a 
certain substance and reality, as mystical and as strange, 
as full of approaching doom and yet as actual as a 
momentary resurrection from the dead. It ceases with 
the close of his reign, and what Dr. Stubbs has well 
called " the darkness of the ninth century " comes down. 



THE REVOLUTION 13 

The northern pirates fall on the north and west, and 
cut off the islands from the mainland, giving us in Eng- 
land the barrier of the Danish invasions, beyond which 
Anglo-Saxon history grows dim; they crush out the 
customs, and even the religion, of the coasts of the 
Continent. The Hungarian certainly, the heathen Slavs 
of the Baltic presumably, cut in streams through the 
Germanic tribes. The Saracens held the Mediterranean. 
Society fell back upon its ultimate units ; in all that 
mechanical disintegration the molecules of which it is 
composed remained. The village community, self-suffi- 
cing, self-contained, alone preserved an organisation and 
a life. 

For more than a century it hung upon a thread 
whether the Roman tradition should survive, or whether 
our civilisation should fall into the savagery which has 
apparently been elsewhere the fate of systems almost as 
strong. A new thing arose in Europe, destined more 
than any other factor to deflect the current of its Latin 
tradition. There was found, when the light began to 
grow upon this darkness, in nearly every village a little 
king. Whichever men had in the old times been pos- 
sessed of power, local officials, large owners of land, 
leaders in the great armies, emerge from the cataclysm 
welded into one new class — the nobles; and with the 
appearance of this caste, with the personal emotions 
and the strong local feeling that their system developed, 
Europe becomes a feudal society. But that society 
contained another element, which was destined to control 
and at last to destroy the feudality. For strangely 
enough, this period, which had thrown Europe into such 
anarchy, had produced an idea the very opposite of such 
a character. The nationalities begin to arise. The kings 
■ — weak shadows — nobles, often of small power, but no 
longer the mere leaders of armies, become symbols of a 
local unit, separated from the Empire. They stood for 



14 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

the nation round which the patriotism that you will 
discover in the old epics was to gather. 

France, more perhaps than any of the new divisions, 
illustrates all this. A small weak king, one Capet, was 
elected from among the nobles at the end of the tenth 
century, and the family which ultimately toppled over 
from the immensity of its burden, descended from him 
in direct line from father to son through more than 
eight hundred years. 

In the early years of that crusading century which is 
the vigorous opening of the life that was to produce our 
Europe, a discovery was made which was destined to help 
this new kingship to take a very different shape. In the 
loot of Amalfi, in a petty war, the Koman Code of Law 
was rediscovered. 

It had the effect which might be imagined in a 
barbarous society which the Normans and Hildebrand 
had at last aroused. It suddenly gave a text and an 
accurate guide to those splendid but vague memories of 
Imperial order and civilisation. 

Everywhere the Universities arise; from Bologna 
come out the corporation of the lawyers, the students 
of the code, the men whose decisions were final, who 
led mediaeval society as the scientists lead ours to-day; 
and ever3rwhere they tended to the two bases of the 
Roman idea — absolute sovereignty in the case of the 
State, absolute ownership in the case of the Individual. 

The logical end of such a movement should have 
been the Empire — citizens all equal before the law, the 
feudal system destroyed, the Church dominated by the 
State, the will of the prince supreme. But Europe 
contained a hundred elements beside the lawyers, though 
these were the most permanent and active force of her 
civiHsation. The Manorial unit was strong; there are 
places where it survives to-day.i The aristocracy was 

^ For example, the island of Serque. 



THE REVOLUTION 15 

strong. In Poland and England it ended by conquering 
tlie Crown and the Roman law. The Church, affected as 
it was by the new ideas, still had a host of anomalous habits 
and institutions, grown up since the fall of the Empire. 

In the anarchy of the dark ages the framework 
of intense local differences had been constructed; the 
village, the guild, the chapter, each had their special 
customs born of isolation. Finally, the spirit of secon- 
dary nationalities was powerful in many places ; notably 
among the Germans it conquered every other tendency. 

Now France was especially favourable to the growth 
of the influences of this law ; she was very Roman by 
tradition, and by tradition Imperial. Charlemagne had 
left his clothes to Germany, but his spirit to Gaul. The 
sub-nationalities, Provence, Normandy, the Gascons, had, 
in spite of their local patriotism, epics in which they 
harped on " Doulce France Terre Majeure." But though 
the national forces on the whole inclined towards the 
lawyers and the Crown, the path by which absolute 
centralisation could be reached was tortuous and had 
to be well chosen. The nobles are slowly bereft of 
political power, but their privilege remains ; the peasant 
gradually acquires the land, but many feudal dues lie 
on a tenure which has lost all its feudal meaning. The 
Church becomes the king's, but it remains in adminis- 
tration of its vast possessions : to the last the Crown 
works through (or attempts to work through) the local 
organisation that was once supreme and is fast dying. 

You may compare the progress of the Capetians 
towards absolute power to the action of a gentleman who 
obtains an estate at the cost of perpetual bribery, and 
finds himself crippled when he has at last succeeded. 

Finally, the lawyers themselves become sterilised in 
the general decay which their policy has created. Even 
the Crown is half-allied to the privileged bodies in prac- 
tice, and altogether allied in sentiment; the government 



i6 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

wliicli had for centuries created and sustained the people 
now found itself remote from them and the source of its 
power cut off. 

I will give but a couple of examples to illustrate the 
centralisation and the hopeless confusion that accompanied 
it. The first is from De Tocqueville. A village near Paris 
wished to raise a small local rate to mend the steeple of 
the church. They could not do so without appealing to 
Versailles. The leave was granted after two years, but 
the steeple had broken down. The second is from the 
records of the election of '89. In a bailiwick of Cham- 
pagne it was discovered that no one accurately knew the 
boundaries of the district, that the next bailiwick was 
similarly ignorant, and finally an arbitrary line was drawn. 
This is one out of dozens of cases. The population of 
Paris was not known; the number of electors in every 
division was uncertain. 

Such was the France in which reform was necessary. 
The land, by a continual and misdirected interference with 
exchange, was going out of cultivation — or rather (for 
even in the worst cases of depression this symptom is 
rare) it was yielding less and less as time went on. 

The classes into which society was divided had become 
separated by an etiquette as rigorous as a religion, and 
though the thing has gone, the phrases that described 
it are vigorous to this day, and lead continually to the 
gravest misconception. A France where one Frenchman 
has grown so like another still lets its literature run upon 
some of the old lines. 

Five great divisions should especially be noticed in 
connection with the Revolution — the peasants, the arti- 
sans, the middle class, the professionals, the noblesse ; 
and side by side with these, a separate thing, the Church, 
sharply divided into the higher and lower clergy. Let 
me, at the risk of some digression, enter into the details 
of these various groups. 



THE REVOLUTION 17 

The peasants were the majority of the nation, as they 
are to-day. At a rough guess, out of some five miUion 
heads of families, three and a half at least were of this 
class. What were they ? They were more ignorant, more 
fearful, and more unhappy than ever the inhabitants of 
French soil had been before. 1 believe it is no exaggera- 
tion to say that the worst of the barbarian invasions had 
not produced among them such special and intense misery 
as had the running down of the governmental machine in 
the eighteenth century. Their songs had ceased. Search 
the folk-lore of France, and you will find a kind of gap after 
the centralisation was complete, and after the lords had left 
them — after the seventeenth century. It is as though that 
oldest sign of communal life, the traditions and the stories 
of the little circle of the village, had died just before the 
death of the village itself. As to religion, with which all 
this natural and fertile love of legend is so closely knit, it 
lingered, but it lingered hardly. The priest still survived, 
but his action was cut off by penury; in places the extreme 
physical needs of the peasantry, whose lot he shared, 
entered into his life to an intolerable degree, and a half- 
paganism resulted. Twenty, thirty pounds a year is not 
enough for the celibate who holds the sacramental power 
in the village. I will show you in the rural communes 
of France church after church part of whose buildings are 
very old, part very new : and what is the reason ? That 
in all these places the church fell into ruins till the new 
State came to rebuild it. You may discover many cases of 
restoration in the eighteenth century where a great cathedral 
or a famous church or abbey is renewed : it is the work of the 
upper clergy, and the dole out of their vast fortunes. In the 
villages such cases are rare and eccentric. The Kevolution, 
for all its antagonism, gave to the Faith a new life. There 
are to-day more monasteries and convents, more of the 
clergy, both regular and secular, by far more missionaries, 
than there were in 1789, but there are fewer bishops. 

B 



i8 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

The peasant owned land, his roof and a few acres 
beside ; he had been buying for generations, and the drift 
of the law when it turned feudal tenant-right into owner- 
ship was in his favour. But this ownership of the land, 
the foundation of his future citizenship, was for the 
moment his curse. It made him an independent man, 
while he still had to pay the dues of his feudal depen- 
dence. And independence works both ways. He stood, 
ignorant and extremely poor, face to face with the all- 
powerful State. His natural support and guide had left 
the village for the court ; the lord was nothing more than 
a name for endless annoyance and local exaction. The 
symptom that comes just before death showed itself in the 
ploughman and the labourer in the vineyard. He lost 
heart ; he was too tired and too beaten to work ; the great 
burden of the State, its taxes, its follies, had accumulated 
on his shoulders, and had bent them so low that he could 
no longer stir the earth with vigour into harvests. 

Such men did not make the Revolution ; they were the 
inert mass upon which it worked. They did not siug the 
war-songs ; they did not understand the meaning of the 
invasions. No peasant marked the assemblies with the 
sense or cunning of the fields, the sound of patois was 
lacking in the great chorus, and as you read the Revolu- 
tion you feel continually the lack of something closely 
in touch with Nature, because the most French of all 
Frenchmen had forgotten how to speak. 

The Revolution has made them ; and to this day the 
heirs of the Republic wonder at the peasant in his 
resurrection. From him come the humour, the gaiety, 
the manhood; it is his presence in the suffrage that 
criticises and tones down the crudities of political 
formulae. He has re-created a host of songs, he has turned 
all France into a kind of walled garden ; underneath the 
politicians, and in spite of them, he is working out the 
necessary thing which shall put flesh on to the dry bones 



THE REVOLUTION 19 

of the Revolution, — I mean the reconciliation of the 
Republic and the Church. 

As to the artisans, they play in the story of the 
movement a subsidiary but an interesting part. The 
artisans (in the sense in which I use the term) were found 
only in the great towns. At least the artisans outside 
these centres must be reckoned as part of the peasantry, 
for their spirit was that of the village. These craftsmen 
of the towns did not form a large percentage of the nation. 
Perhaps half-a-million families — perhaps a trifle more. 
But their concentration, the fact that they could come in 
hundreds and hear the orators, the fact that they alone, 
by the accidents of their position, could form mobs, these 
were the causes of their peculiar effect upon the Revolu- 
tionary movement. 

Like the peasant, the ouvrier gives hardly any type to 
politics. If we except Hi^bert, on the strength of his 
being a vagabond ticket-collector, there is hardly any one 
of prominence who comes from the labourers in the towns. 
But the combined effort of the class was great and was as 
follows: — It furnished for the party of revolt an angry 
and ready army of the streets ; it was capable of follies and 
of violence almost unlimited ; it was capable also of con- 
centration and common action. It filled the tribunes of 
the clubs, and more than once terrorised the Parliament. 
It was patriotic, but wofuUy suspicious; and in all it did the 
main fault was a lack, or rather a dislike, of delay, of self- 
criticism, and of self-control : the ruling passion anger, and 
the motive of this anger the partial information, the 
extreme false idea, of the political movement, which it 
was willing to read into every speech dehvered. 

I will attempt to say why this character, the worst 
and the most dangerous of the period, was developed in 
the labour of the towns. In the first place, the industrial 
system is of itself fatal to the French character. It is not 
in the traditions of the nation; it is opposed to the tendencies 



20 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

which the most superficial observer can discover in them. 
The Frenchman saves and invests in small parcels, loves 
to work with his own tools, is impatient of a superior 
unless it be in some domestic relation, is attached to the 
home life, and above all is no good specialist : " II veut 
rester homme." You will find too many artists, too few 
machines in a crowd of them. 

It may be that a cheap distribution of power, or 
that some other economic change, will reinstate the small 
capitalist; till then, for all his industry, the French 
workman will be at a disadvantage. In the great towns, 
in the manufactory, under a central control which has no 
political basis of right, cut off from the fields for which 
the peasant in him always yearns, he is like good wine 
turned sour. 

In the second place, the system of the old regime 
had produced an aristocracy of labour such as many 
reformers demand in England to-day. Mediaeval restric- 
tions, which had once applied to all workers, and had 
been designed to limit competition between men all of 
whom were employed, survived in 1789 as guilds and 
companies strictly protected by law, with fixed hours of 
labour, fixed wages — every kind of barrier to exclude 
the less fortunate artisans. A system that under St. 
Louis had made life more secure for all, had, under his 
descendants, separated the workmen into two classes of 
the over- and the under-paid, and these last increased. 

In the third place, the recent treaty of commerce 
with England had worked most disadvantageously for 
French manufacture, and in all the great towns, especially 
in Paris, thousands of men were out of work. 

In the fourth place, the general scarcity of agri- 
cultural produce struck the ouvrier, even if he were 
employed at good wages, in the heaviest fashion. 

Between the cornfield and the city came the taxes, 
the feudal dues, the provincial frontier duties, and 



THE REVOLUTION 21 

finally tlie octroi paid at the city gates. So inept a 
method of continually harassing exchange could not 
but react upon production, and even when the harvest 
was plentiful bread was dear in the great cities. Even 
when these internal taxes did not diminish the output, 
they raised the price in the towns. 

Finally, the Church, which, as we have seen, had none 
too firm a hold on the villagers, had lost all power over 
the townsmen. To what was this due ? Presumably 
to the apathy which had overtaken the rich higher 
clergy, a class which naturally congregated in the towns, 
especially in Paris, and whose example influenced all 
the surrounding priests. Add to this the destruction 
of the old unit of the parish in the city. The industrial 
system had broken up the neighbourliness of the capital. 
Men rarely lived in their own houses, often changed their 
lodgings to follow their work. There is no worse enemy 
to the parochial and domestic character of our religion 
than the economic change from which we suffer. Now 
with the Church was associated all the morality of their 
traditions ; without it they were lost. They had not read 
the philosophers ; Rousseau had not permeated so deep. 
For the matter of that, they would have cared little for 
him or for Seneca ; and, deprived of any code, they were 
at the mercy of every passion and of all unreason. 
Only this much remained : that they honestly hated 
injustice ; that egotism had very little to do with their 
anger ; that they were capable of admirable enthusiasms. 
They had not the little qualities of the rich, and they 
also escaped their vices. One great virtue attached to 
them : they did nothing at the expense of the country's 
honour ; no reactionary or foreigner bought them ; they 
were patriotic through all their errors. 

To these characters, which they brought into the 
Revolution, a further accident must be added. They 
became disfranchised. As we shall see later, the con- 



22 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

stitution of 1790, based upon tlie very sound prin^ 
ciple of representing those only wlio supported the 
State, gave no provision (as it should have done) for 
making that support fall upon the shoulders of all. It 
enfranchised the great bulk of Frenchmen — over four 
million entered the ranks of the " Active Citizens " — but 
it disfranchised the very class which sat in the galleries 
of the Parliament or ran to the Place de Greve. The 
workman, living in lodgings or flats sublet, often chang- 
ing his residence, rarely paid any direct tax; he alone, 
therefore, lost the vote to which practically every peasant 
was entitled. This accident (it was not planned) worked 
in two ways. It added to the discontent of the Parisian 
workman, but it also forbade his movements to take 
political shape. To the very last the initiative was in 
the hands of others. 

These others were the three remaining divisions — 
the middle class, the professionals, and the nobles. 

It would be an error to make too hard and fast the 
barriers between these classes. In the cart that took the 
Dantonists to the guillotine all three were to be found. 
Nevertheless it aids a history of the Kevolutionary period 
to distinguish each from each. 

The bourgeoisie meant almost anything from a small 
shopkeeper to a successful lawyer. It was not so much 
the man's occupation as his breeding and domestic sur- 
roundings that made him of this rank. Let me explain 
what I mean. Suppose the family of a linendraper (such 
as was Priestley's family or Johnson's in England) pos- 
sessed of several thousand pounds. Let them put a son 
to the bar, and let the son succeed at the profession ; well, 
the man and his son, so different in their pursuits, would 
yet remain in the class I desire to define, unless by some 
accident they got " in with " one of the literary coteries 
with which the noblesse mingled. And this separation 
would be something much more definite than in the 



THE REVOLUTION 23 

parallel case in England. This class of the bourgeoisie 
stood like a great phalanx in the Revolution. Not one 
in ten of the class I am attempting to describe had 
entered the salons; there was not (as there is in an 
aristocratic state) any great desire to know the noblesse. 
An accident of surroundings, of eminence, or of friend- 
ship might lift a man from this class, but he would leave 
it with regret. 

Of this class were Eobespierre, Marat (in spite of his 
aristocratic milieu), Bonaparte,^ Danton himself, Santerre, 
Legendre, Carnot, Couthon, Barrfere — dozens of all the 
best-known names in the second period of the Revolu- 
tion. 

Brewers, builders, large shopkeepers, a host of pro- 
vincial lawyers — these all over France, to the number of 
at least a million voters, formed a true middle class such 
as we lack in England. Note also that they might rise 
to a very considerable position without leaving this rank. 
A man might be physician to the first houses, a king's 
counsel, a judge, anything almost except the colonel of a 
regiment, and yet be a bourgeois, and his son after him. 
In the memoirs of the last century you will find con- 
tinually a kind of disgust expressed by the upper class 
against a set just below them; it is the class feeling 
against the bourgeoisie, their choice of words, their restric- 
tions of fortune, their unfashionable virtues. These men 
were often learned ; among the lawyers they were the pick 
of France ; they had a high culture, good manners, in the 
case of individuals wit, and sometimes genius, but they 
were not gentlefolk, and had no desire to be thought so. 

Of those, however, who were technically bourgeois, 
possessing no coat of arms nor receiving feudal dues, 
some had practically passed by an accident of association 

^ Bonaparte may have had a noble ancestry. But so had more than 
one true bourgeois whose family had had neither the means nor the desire 
to insist upon the privileged rank in the past. 



24 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

into the upper class of all. They met constantly in some 
salon, library, or scientific body members of the privileged 
order ; their dress, manners, and conceptions were those of 
the liberal noblesse. To such men, very small in number 
and very influential, I would give the name of Profes- 
sionals. The class is complete if you add to it the many 
noble names who stood prominent in the sciences or the 
arts. It was recruited from legal families of long stand- 
ing, from financiers. It was polite, wealthy, often singularly 
narrow. Of such a type were the Marquis de Condorcet, 
Bailly, Sieyfes ; even Koland might be counted, though he 
hardly stood so high. These were the theorisers of the 
Revolution, with no practical grievance, ignorant of the 
mob, despising and misunderstanding the bourgeoisie 
(save in their political speeches) ; they were the orators of 
the new regime, and died with the Girondins. 

As to the noblesse (who partly overlapped these last, 
and yet as a class were so distinct), they formed a body 
with which this book will hardly deal, and upon which 
I will touch but lightly. In very great numbers, the 
bulk of them by no means rich (though some, of course, 
were the greatest millionaires of their day), they were 
defined by a legal status rather than an especial manner. 

He was noble whom the king had ennobled or who 
could prove an ancestry from the feudal lords of the 
manors.^ The family name was never heard, only the 
territorial name preceded by the " de." They had also 
this in common, that the whole great swarm of families, 
thousands and thousands, had a cousinship with that 
higher stratum which made the court. This cousinship 
was acknowledged; it put them in the army; it gave 
them the right to be spitted in a duel, and, above all, it 
exempted them from taxes. It made them, wherever they 
went, a particular class, to be revered by fools, and able 

^ For the sake of clearness I do not mention the large class who had 
purchased fiefs, all technically noble, many practically bourgeois. 



THE REVOLUTION 25 

to irritate their enemies merely by existing — a privilege 
of some value. They held together in the heat of the 
reform, and it was only from the higher part of the 
noblesse that the deserters came — Mirabeau, Lafayette, 
and De S^chelles, The great bulk of them were poor, 
and consequently determined in the matter of privilege 
and feudal right that gave them their pittance. The class 
was richer than the bourgeoisie, but numerous families 
in it had not the capital of a bourgeois household, and 
many a poor lady boasts to-day of family estates lost in 
the Kevolution, whose ancestry had no estates at all, but 
only a few tithes and a chance in the spoil to be had at 
court. 

Now to all these, without exception, reform seemed 
necessary ; it was only when the Revolution was in full 
swing that the opposition of particular bodies appeared. 
The peasant was in misery; the artisan was angry; the 
middle class, possessed of that feeling which Siey^s ex- 
pressed in a phrase : " Qu'est-ce que le Tiers liltat ? — 
Rien;" and they were determined to work upon the 
sequel : " Que doit-il etre ? — Tout." To this general 
chorus of demand the professionals added a strong con- 
viction (in the abstract) of the good of self-government 
and of the necessity for removing State interference. 
The noblesse, as a class, expected nothing in particular 
to happen, but they were not unwilling for a Parliament 
to meet ; they also suffered from the extreme complexity, 
or rather anarchy, into which things had fallen. Talent 
saw itself wrecked by court intrigue; piety was offended by 
the sight of a starving priest side by side with a careless, 
wealthy, often irreligious member of the higher clergy. 
Moreover, there ran through the nobility this curious 
feeling — an error which you will always find in the more 
generous of a privileged class — namely, that in some 
mysterious way their special rights might be abolished 
and they not suffer for it — as though there were some 



26 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

vast sum in reserve, into whicli the State had but to put 
its hand and relieve the poor without taxing the rich. 
On the moral as on the material side this error obtained, 
and Lafayette, a man created by privilege, thought that 
when privilege was abolished his native virtues would 
lift him into the first rank. 

To all this attitude of expectancy, and to this instant 
demand for reform, was added the insurmountable thing 
that made the Parliament necessary. The great symptom 
of decay had shown itself — the revenue could no longer be 
raised. Luckily for France, there existed in the last cen- 
tury no such international finance as exists at present, 
and the fatal temptation of external debt was not offered. 
With a population not quite two-thirds what it is to-day, 
the country failed to raise one-twentieth of what it now 
pays with ease. The debt was increasing with a terrifying 
rapidity, and since all the methods of centralised routine 
had failed, it was necessary to turn to the last resource, 
and the nation was asked to vote a tax. With promises 
of redress, with an understanding that the Assembly was 
to reform upon all sides, with a special demand for a 
statement of grievances, but especially for the necessities 
of revenue, the States General were summoned for the 
first time in a hundred and seventy-five years. 

Such was the condition that preceded the Revolution. 
We have seen the attitude of the various social classes 
and the material necessity that prepared the reform. 
Now what were the ideas that were about to guide it ? 
What theory was moving the men who met at Versailles ? 
What form would the national character give to the 
changes which were in preparation ? 

It will be necessary here to propose a paradox. The 
French character, which has been blamed so frequently 
since the Revolution (and so justly) for an excess of 
idealism, possesses at the same time a passion for the 
positive, the objective, and the certain. In the same 



THE REVOLUTION 27 

man you will continually find some idea wliicli pushes 
him to extremes, and in the ordinary affairs of life a 
most exact sense of reality, even sometimes an exasperat- 
ing accuracy of detail. They are not alone in discovering 
an antithesis in the national character ; in England, Ger- 
many, or Northern Italy it would be equally possible to 
show two apparently opposite characteristics united in the 
same civic type. But perhaps the nearest parallel we have 
at home to the contrasts of the French is to be seen in 
the Scotch people ; like the French, a nation of indepen- 
dents, thrifty, investing continually in small sums, zealous 
of pence ; like the French, on the other hand, they delight 
in the abstract problem ; they will attach themselves to 
some idea, and hold it to the point of mart3rrdom. 

What was the result of these two tendencies ? In 
some characters they balanced each other. Condorcet 
comes to the mind as an example. But, as with other 
nations, the two aspects of France appeared (in much 
the greater number of her citizens) exalted to a violent 
degree that corresponded with the extreme danger and 
the extreme hopes of a moment of crisis. 

I do not mean that you would have found in France 
two factions, the one of visionaries, the other of practical 
men; I mean that throughout the Eevolution the goal 
and the method of attaining it reflected this double 
nature. Consider the decrees and their effects. At 
the sight of what the Assemblies from 1789 to 1795 
are trying to do you would say, " A set of men attempt- 
ing to build a city of dreams ; " there is hardly anything 
so unnatural but that they will attempt it ; they are ready 
to reconstruct from the foundation. The most violent 
period, that of 1794, is nothing but an effort to make all 
men conform to civic virtue and believe the necessary 
things; the most sane, that of 1791, is yet an attempt 
to realise in the State an equality and a justice that can 
only exist in the soul. 



28 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

But if you turn to their methods and to the measure 
of their success, then you have a very different idea. 
They succeeded beyond all hope. They struck in a 
few months the blows that remoulded all France. The 
centralisation which the practical side of the character 
had created was used to transform France as rapidly as 
though the nation had been a household; and not only 
do they find means to do this, but, when the necessity 
arises, they suddenly raise armies of three hundred 
thousand, of a million; they find the commissariat 
somewhere in a starving people, and they succeed. 

While, then, the nation was fitted for action to such a 
degree, what was the theory which its idealism was about 
to embrace ? There had permeated throughout the 
noblesse and the bourgeoisie something more than a phi- 
losophy. It was not only a set of eighteenth-century 
phrases, of Reason, and Nature, and Right, but all these 
things turned into a religion. The apostolic quality of 
Rousseau had touched the mind of France. 

It is the fashion to belittle this man. Something in 
him angers our successful and eager century, and yet but 
for him our century would not have taken the shape it 
has. It is needless to recall the movement which had 
preceded and which surrounded him. He did but com- 
plete the theory of the social contract; he hardly did 
more than repeat the conclusions of the rationalists ; in 
the matter of economics he was entirely ignorant ; he fell 
continually into the error of superficiality where history 
or where the details of institutions were concerned. A 
resident in England, he imagined that her people were 
represented ; writing his famous work at Nuneham 
Courtenay, he could not see that the squire was every- 
thing in the little village. He had all the faults of 
weakness ; he invited a persecution which he had not the 
wit to attack nor the stamina to sustain. What, then, 
made bim such a prophet ? In the first place, the power 



THE REVOLUTION 29 

of words. All his critics in this country (with the 
exception of Mr. Morley perhaps) have failed to appre- 
ciate how great this power was. See what the Jacobean 
translation of the Bible has done in England ; note what 
the pure rhetoric of Burke, proceeding solely from passion 
and untouched by any movement of reason, effected in 
England within a year of the fall of the Bastille : it was 
this that Rousseau did in France. But not this alone. 
If he possessed the power of words, he also had to an ex- 
traordinary degree that other quality which does not reside 
in style but in the texture of the mind. He could write 
in the pure abstract, and produce a piece of clear exposi- 
tion deduced in an unbreakable chain from some funda- 
mental dogma. He never commits the error of supposing 
his first principles to rely upon reason ; he postulates a 
Faith. He allows that Faith to illumine his every 
sentence. He is certain that the things common to all 
men are the things of immeasurable importance; he is 
certain that the accidents of living are secondary. He is 
certain that our being part of all nature is the condition 
of happiness and of good; he is certain that the com- 
plexity of living which separates us from Nature is an 
evil, and to a France tortured with age he proposes 
this simple water of youth : that it should return to the 
first conditions of a small hamlet; where the families 
met together dictate the law ; where each sees himself to 
be a part of the whole, and where the harmony that all 
men sought comes easily to an ideal democracy hidden 
in happy valleys. It is idle to argue that complexity was 
there ; that France could not have at once the patriotism 
of twenty million, and the institutions of a hundred, 
hearths. Every one saw that difficulty, and in the midst 
of '94 the most fervent apostles of Rousseau compromised 
on the chief point, for the principle of election, which he 
hated, remained of necessity the chief method in their 
scheme of democracy. 



30 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

It is not the obstacles, but the motive force that you 
must examine if you would comprehend the fervour of 
the Republic. And the motive force was that passion 
for the conditions under which the race has passed how 
many aeons of its tutelage, the harking back to the pre- 
historic things, the village and the tribe, all of whose 
spirit ran through the books that preached simplicity 
with such admirable eloquence. 

There remains one feature to be discussed before we 
turn to a brief outline of Danton's place in the move- 
ment — a feature which will be of capital importance 
throughout this book. That feature is the hegemony of 
Paris. It was the rule of Paris that made the whole 
course of the Revolution. In that focus of discussion 
and of passion the great advances and the great blunders 
of the Revolution took place. Paris alone made the 14th 
of July, almost alone the loth of August, alone and 
against France the 2nd of June. Many an historian has 
seen in her position an error that should have been and 
could have been avoided. It is an opinion which from 
the time of Mirabeau to our own day has laiu in the mind 
of French statesmen, that Paris must be jealously watched, 
played, forbidden control. 

Why does Paris hold this position ? Here is a city- 
state, eager, concentrated, the centre in many things of 
our European civilisation; that it should continually 
exert a moral influence over the State is easily to be 
understood, but Paris did more — it conquered and domi- 
nated the State, and France continually permitted that 
leadership. 

There is, I believe, a point of view from which this 
historical fact becomes no longer an accident but a 
reasonable thing; and if we take that point of view it 
will be possible to understand why from the beginning 
she preserved the initiative, and became and remained 
till Thermidor the mistress of France. 



THE REVOLUTION 31 

The people of tliat country are, for mucli tlie greater 
part, tlie peasants wliom I have described. They have 
for centuries been owners of the soil, and for at least two 
thousand years (perhaps far longer) they have found all 
their social, all their physical, and most of their intel- 
lectual interests in the intense but narrow life of a 
village community. In any great expanse of view you 
see the white houses, all huddled together without 
gardens, and between each group bare vast brown fields 
empty of farmsteads. These peasants have in them an 
admirable cousinship with the soil; their phrases and 
their proverbs are drawn directly from the fields and 
rivers ; they are as healthy as Nature herself. Such is 
the general mass of France; but these innumerable 
villages, these vigorous swarms of men who work in the 
sunlight, need a bond. Some concrete object must be 
present to give true unity to many vague national im- 
pressions. Something must be the 'persona of these 
millions, and through the mouth of that something they 
must hear action formulated, patriotism expressed, the 
law defined. From it must come the executive, and of 
it are expected the direct orders and the government by 
which, in times of crisis, a nation is saved. 

This brain, which is necessary to a complex organism, 
might have been found in a high priest or a despot; 
but we in England unconsciously look for it in an oli- 
garchy. Seeing the squires wanting, we think there is 
nothing, and we draw doleful conclusions when we note 
the absence in the French villages of the forces that 
invigorate our own. We complain of the centralisation 
that atrophies, forgetting the oligarchy that cows and 
debases the inferior class ; and while we despise the 
pohtical apathy of French country life, we ignore the 
negation of society in our great cities. 

The truth is that no definite system can escape 
attendant evils, and that if one nation does not adopt 



32 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

tlie methods that have succeeded in another it is because 
those methods are connected with instinct, and instinct 
can neither be taught nor adopted. 

"^ It was instinct that forbade the growth in France 
of oligarchic institutions. Everything was ready for it ; 
the feudal system would seem its proper parent; the 
lords of the manors were so many seeds of what should 
have been a territorial aristocracy. They were destined 
to fail, and to say why is impossible, because it is impos- 
sible to explain Nature ; we can only feel. Something in 
the genius of the nation makes for equality with the 
depth and silence of a strong tide at night. It is not 
the Roman law — all the nations had that. It is not 
even the Church — there is a something in the Church 
which neglects if it does not despise civic ideals. It is 
not the distribution of capital — that can be distinctly 
proved to be an historical result and not a cause. No, 
it is not an exterior force, but something from within 
which has produced this passion, the soul (as it were) 
forming the body. " La France a fait la France." 

If aristocracy were impossible, what remained ? The 
walled towns. They are like pins on which the lace of 
France is stretched; the roads unite them and make a 
web which supports the rural communes. Never far 
apart, always living a life intensely their own, the walled 
towns stood guardian over surrounding villages. Here 
was the cathedral or the abbey, the judges, the college. 
It would give the name to a district, it would form with 
its dependent communes a kind of little state. News 
from the outside was concentrated here, and if a religious 
or political enthusiasm ran from the Rousillion to the 
Artois, it was not the villages that caught fire in the 
mass, but the towns, that passed the message on like 
beacons. 

Now as the roots of this municipal system were to 
be found in Rome, these needed a little Rome to cap it. 



THE REVOLUTION 33 

These towns being all of a kind, they of necessity fell 
grouped under the largest of their class. The tendency 
was well marked even before Gaul was re-united; the 
same force that made the great archbishoprics makes the 
metropolitan civil influence. Thus Rheims, Lyons/ and 
Toulouse stand out hierarchically the heads of provinces 
— a very different kind of town from Canterbury (let us 
say) or Lichfield, where once they talked of an arch- 
bishopric for Mercia. 

Well, as the power of the Crown increases (which is 
another way of saying, " as the nation realises its memo- 
ries of unity "), there increase with it the means of com- 
munication, and especially the strong centralised system 
which, as we have seen in another part of this chapter, 
had become a fatal necessity to France. Remember also 
that till the very end of the seventeenth century Paris had 
been uniquely the king's town, and had so been (with 
one short interval) for more than a thousand years. 
Here was every single organ which the executive of a 
centralised government may need, and (what is more 
important) here was the place where each organ had grown ; 
they were in the fibre of the place. Even if we go back 
no farther than the Capetians, we have a full seven hun- 
dred years of development in one spot from the familiar 
domestic origins, the little barbarous court in the palace 
on the island to the great city of nearly a million souls, 
whose terms and professions and classes, and whose every 
institution had developed round the throne. 

When one remembers that the king had abandoned 
Paris but a hundred years ; that he had left in the capital 
by far the greater part of the central machinery, espe- 
cially the lawyers; that even from what he had taken 
many relics remained, and that professional men of all 
classes had the family tradition of the court in the capital 

^ Lyons was, of course, a frontier town of the empire, but locally it is 
the centre of its own country the " Lyonnais." 

C 



34 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

— then we can understand what Paris was, is, and must 
be to a France where no class is permitted to govern. 
Add to this the increasing specialisation of function as 
the organism develops — the concentration of the brain — 
and Paris of the eighteenth century, abandoned as it is, 
hurt in its dignity, and a little uncertain of its action, 
still fulfils the geography-books, and is the capital of 
France. 

She herseK hardly knew how certainly power would 
fall into her hands, yet from the first mention of the 
States General it was fated. 

This, then, is the position as the States General meet. 
A nation in absolute material need of reform, that must 
have new institutions, especially new financial institutions, 
or die ; classes separate from each other, mutually ignorant 
of each other, yet all in some degree feeling the position 
into which France had fallen : in the case of the bulk of 
the people, misgovernment appearing in the form of star- 
vation ; in the case of the upper classes and of the govern- 
ment itself, a conviction that the existing system was 
contrary to all reason and opposed to every sound interest. 

In this society, at least in that part of it that wUl be 
called upon to govern, is a conviction — a religion, if you 
will — whose basis was the faith of Rousseau. Conditions 
will moderate this for a time ; the necessary compromise 
with what exists, the desire for peace that was uppermost 
in the first two years, will make men slow to uproot and 
destroy what may touch the interests of friends and of 
large classes. They will always attempt a legal though 
a rapid reform. But, in spite of them, on account of that 
passionate conviction which underlay their most moderate 
actions, the Revolution will move up towards the region of 
unattainable things. The reformer will give way to the 
Republican idealist when once the serious opposition of 
the court is felt ; he in his turn will give way to the man 
of passion and of action when the country is in danger ; 



THE REVOLUTION 35 

and even the man of passion and of action — tlie man 
of realities — will give way to the more visionary before 
reaction can come to sweep the floor clean in 1794. 

Such will be the phases through which the form of the 
Revolution will pass. As for the soul of it, France will be 
steadily transformed, and, in spite of visionaries, reactions, 
and every political accident, a new and a strong society 
will be created. So the salt water comes in through old 
dykes ; on its surface you will note the phases of a flood, 
innumerable little streams, a torrent, a spreading lake, and 
ultimately calm, but only one thing all the while is happen- 
ing — where there has been land there will be the sea. 

What place did Danton take in this transformation ? 
Of his opinions in detail, his habit of body and mind, his 
convictions, the accidents of his life, it is the purport of 
this biography to treat. I will attempt only a very brief 
description of his position, to make clear the drift of his 
Revolutionary career, and with this close a chapter whose 
only object has been to describe the surroundings of a 
character with which the rest of this book is concerned. 

Danton belonged to the bourgeoisie in rank, to the 
less visionary in the bent of his mind. A young and suc- 
cessful lawyer of thirty, the Revolution found him unknown 
to politics and not desiring election. It was the accident 
of oratory that gave him his first position. He discovered 
himself to be a leader, and there grouped round him a 
knot of the most ardent, some of them the most brilliant, 
younger reformers. The electoral district to which he 
happened to belong became through him the most demo- 
cratic, and, in some ways, the most violent of Paris. 

That part of him which led to such a position was his 
sympathy. His tenderness (and he had a great share of 
this quality) was hidden under the energy of his rough 
voice, great frame, and violent gesture. His pity he was 
slow to express. But the great crowd of men who were 
unrepresented, the smaller but more influential class of 



^6 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

those who felt and knew but could not speak — these 
were attracted to him because he had the instinct of the 
people. He was a demagogue at moments and for a 
purpose, but never by profession nor for any period of 
time. What he was, however, all his life and by nature, 
was a Tribune. 

The secret workings of the soil, the power that makes 
all the qualities of a nation from its wine to its heroes, 
these had produced him as they produce the tree or the 
harvest. He is the most French, the most national, the 
nearest to the mother of all the Revolutionary group. 
He summed up France ; and, the son of a small lawyer in 
Champagne, he was a peasant, a bourgeois, almost a 
soldier as well. When we study him it is like looking at 
a landscape of Rousseau's or a figure of Millet's. We feel 
France. 

His voice was a good symbol of his mind, for there 
was heard in it not only the deep tone of a multitude, 
but that quality which comes from the mingling of many 
parts — the noise of waters or of leaves. In his political 
attitude he attained this collective quality, not by a vary- 
ing point of view which is confusion, but by an integra- 
tion. His opinions erred on the side of bluntness and of 
directness. They were expressed in plain sentences of a 
dozen words; he abhorred the classical allusion, he was 
chary of metaphor. He spoke as a crowd would speak, 
or an army, or a tribe, if it had a voice. 

This was Danton, the public orator and the Tribune, 
who for two years was heard at the Cordeliers, who spoke 
always for the purely democratic reform, who opposed 
the moderates, and who helped to destroy the com- 
promise. Never identified with Paris, he yet saw clearly 
the necessity of Paris. He admitted her claim, fenced 
with her arrogance, but never worshipped her idols ; once 
or twice he even dared to blame her worst follies. Elected 
to the administration of the city, he played but a slight 



THE REVOLUTION 37 

role, and until tlie spring of 1792 there is in him no 
other quality. 

The spring of 1792 produced the war with Europe, 
and from that date Danton appears in another light. 
Had he died then, we should have known him only 
by chance references, a centre of strong reforming 
speeches, an obscure man in opposition. But with the 
outbreak of a war which he had done nothing to bring 
on, and which his party thought unwise, Danton shows 
that his character, in summing up his fellows, caught 
especially their patriotism. France was the first thought, 
and if we could hear not the debaters only, but all the 
voices of France when the invasion began, it would be 
this immediate necessity of saving the country that 
would drown all other opinions. Thence, and for a full 
year after, Danton becomes the leading man of France. 
The ability which has led to his legal success (now that 
his office is abolished and its reimbursement invested 
in land) seems turned upon the political situation, and 
such ability combined with such a representative quality 
pushes him to the front. Two qualities appeared in him 
which he himself perhaps had not guessed — the power 
of rapid organisation, and the power of so judging char- 
acter as to bring diplomacy to bear upon every accident 
as it arrived. 

It was not strictly he who made the i oth of August, 
but he was the leader. He saw that with the king in 
power the Prussians would reach Paris, and more than 
any man he organised the insurrection. That was the 
one act of violence in his life. 

The rest of the nineteen months that fate allowed 
were spent in the attempt to reconcile and harmonise all 
the forces he could gather for the salvation of the nation. 
Perhaps it was his chief fault that in this matter he held 
to no pure idea. 

A Republican and an ardent reformer, he yet seems' 



38 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

to have thouglit France of so mucli tlie first importance 
that he compromised and trafficked with all possible 
allies. He attempted to stave off the war with England ; 
he attempted to keep Dumouriez; he tried to prevent 
vengeance from following the Girondins; when the ex- 
tremists captured the great Committee, he acquiesced, 
and still wrestled with the forces of disunion. He would 
have hidden, if possible, those wounds which weakened 
France in the eyes of the world, and he waged a futile 
war with the pure idealists — the men of one dogma, 
who in so many separate camps were destroying each 
other for their civic faith, and preparing all the evils of a 
persecution. 

On another side of political action he appeared more 
resolute than any man. It was he who saw the necessity 
of a strong government, he who created the revolutionary 
tribunal, and he who is chiefly responsible for the first 
Committee of Public Safety. He made the dictatorship, 
caring nothing for the principle, caring only to throw 
back the foreigner. " He stamped with his foot, and 
armies came out of the earth." The violent metaphor 
is just. There is a succession, a stream of great armies 
(they say four millions of men !) pouring out from France 
for twenty years. If you will glance at the head of that 
stream, and wonder when you read of Napoleon what first 
called up the regiments, you may see on the Champ de 
Mars in '92, and later demanding the great levy of '93, 
the presence of Danton, the orator with the voice of 
command, the attitude of a charge, the right arm thrown 
forward in the gesture of the sword. 

Possessed of astounding vigour, but lacking ambition, 
a lover of immediate but not of permanent fame, his 
superb energy after a year of effort spent itself in a 
demand for repose. In September 1793 he thought his 
work done and his position secure. He went back into 
his country home, walked in the fields he loved (and of 



THE REVOLUTION 39 

wliicli lie talked before his deatli), revelled in Arcis, 
filling himself with the convivial pleasure that he had 
always desired. He came back in November secure and 
happy — ready, almost from without and as a spectator, 
to continue the task of welding the nation together. It 
was too late. He had created a machine too strong for 
his control. He had seen the Terror swallow up the 
Girondins, and had cried because he could not save them. 

With the winter he began his protests, his persistent 
demands for reason and for common-sense ; in the religious 
and in the political persecution he called for a truce ; 
always his effort turned to the old idea — a united Ke- 
publican France, strong against Europe, with exceptional 
powers against treason in a time of danger, but with a 
margin on the side of mercy. 

He failed. The extreme theorists whom he despised 
had captured his dictatorship, and in April 1794 they 
killed him. 



CHAPTER II 

THE YOUTH OF DANTON 

I SHALL attempt in the following chapter to tell all that 
is known of the first thirty years of Danton's life. Our 
knowledge of this period in his career is extremely slight. 
It is based upon a minute research, but a research under- 
taken only in the latter half of this century ; and it is 
to be feared that the scanty materials will never be 
seriously augmented. Every year makes the task more 
difficult, and a century has rendered impassable the gulf 
■which Michelet, Bougeart, and even Dr. Robinet, have 
been able to bridge with living voices. 

He was bom at Arcis-sur-Aube,-^ a lesser town of the 
Champagne Pouilleuse, that great flat which stretches out 
from the mountain of Rheims beyond the twin peaks, till 
it loses itself in the uplands of the river-partings. Here, 
though it is cold in winter, there are still vineyards 
making their last bastion on the covered slopes of the 
hills that form the northern boundary of the plain. 

The day of his birth was the 26th of October 1759;^ 
the date gives us his relation to the drama in which 
he was to be a chief actor. Five months older than 
Desmoulins, born some months before De Sechelles, eight 
years older than St. Just, he was the junior of Robespierre 
by one and a half, of Mirabeau by ten years ; Louis XVI. 

^ All biographers agree. The first publication of the extract from the 
civil register was obtained by Bougeart in August i860. It was furnished 
to him by M. Ludot, the mayor at the time. There is a ridiculous error in 
the Journal de la Montague, vol. ii. No. 142, "n^ k Orchie sur Aube." 

2 The date is given in the extract mentioned in the preceding note. 

40 



THE YOUTH OF DANTON 41 

and Marie Antoinette were respectively five and four 
years his seniors. He was sixteen years old when their 
predecessor died in ignominy and in dirt. Born six weeks 
after . the fall of Quebec, he received the lasting impres- 
sions of early youth during the rapid decline of the French 
monarchy — the end of a slow decay which threatened to 
be that of the nation itself. But just then Kousseau was 
writing the Contrat Social, to be published in two years ; 
Voltaire was still in the full vigour of his attack, with 
nineteen years of life before him ; it vv^as the year of Can- 
dide ; Diderot was founding the Encyclopaedia. 

The time of his birth coincided with the rising of a 
certain sun which has not yet set upon Europe, but the 
boy's eyes turned to more immediate things, and saw in 
a little provincial place the break-up of a wretched, ex- 
perimental reign. 

This point must be insisted upon, that a country 
town was the best possible place for noting the collapse 
of misgovernment. The country manors were more 
wretched, the provincial capitals more loud and able in 
their expressions of opinion ; but few places could show 
the fatal process of disintegration more clearly than these 
little proviQcial centres, the sub-prefectures of to-day. 
The confusion of power, the excess and the ill-working 
of privilege, the complexity and weakness of government, 
were there apparent upon every occasion. The wealth of 
the nation was diminished most especially by the inter- 
ference with exchange. This (though ultimately a 
source of their penury) was less directly evident to the 
villagers, while the large town with its varied production 
could (in another form) disguise the evil; but to the 
small borough the experience was direct and terrible. 

Again, the practical equality of educated men was 
there more apparent and more sinned against than in 
the wider societies of the large towns. In a place like 
Arcis-sur-Aube, isolated specimens of classes technically 



42 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

distinct were continually in contact. The less tlie number 
of their caste and order (and the less their importance), 
the more do the noblesse, to this day, put on their pride ; 
and yet the more necessary is it, in the life of a small 
town, that they should associate with those whose con- 
Tersation and abilities are precisely their own. In Paris 
or in Lyons, where large cliques were occupied in general 
interests, such differences were often neglected; in the 
forgotten towns of the provinces never. 

On the other hand, the blind and dumb anger of the 
peasantry would hardly reach Arcis. All over France 
the town misunderstood the countryside, and in the early 
Revolution actually fought against it. This will appear 
strange to an English reader, who sees scarcely any con- 
trast between a country market and an overgrown village. 
In England the distinction hardly exists, but in France 
the borough is very separate from the peasant society 
outside, and, though often smaller than some large neigh- 
bouring vUlage, it keeps to this day the Roman traditions 
of a city. 

We see, then, that Danton's birthplace in great part 
accounts for the peculiar bent of his future poHtics: 
practical, of legal effect, inspired by no hatred, though 
strongly influenced by a personal experience of misgovern- 
ment. But his parentage will show us still more clearly 
how the conditions of his origin affected his career. 

He was of the lawyers. His father was procureur 
in the bailiwick of Arcis. It is difficult to explain the 
functions of his office at this date and to an English 
reader, for it belongs to that " Administration" which is so 
essentially Latin, and which we are but just beginning to 
experience in England. Let it suffice to describe him as 
the official whose duty it was to supply that which in 
England the institution of the grand jury still in theory 
provides, as it did once in reality. It was his business to 
" present " the cases and the accused to the local criminal 



THE YOUTH OF DANTON 43 

court — local, because in France tlie circuit of assize is 
unknown. Added to this were many duties and privi- 
leges of registration, of stamping and so forth; and the 
position required an accurate, and even a minute know- 
ledge of the royal law and provincial usage, the compli- 
cated customary system of the old regime. 

It is perhaps of still more importance to appreciate 
the social position of Jacques Danton. Belonging to the 
lower branches of the legal profession, and placed in a 
lesser borough of Champagne, the father of Danton held 
something of the same rank as would a small country 
solicitor in one of our market-towns, with whatever addi- 
tions of dignity might follow from a permanent office in 
the municipality of the place. 

As to fortune, we do not accurately know the amount 
of the family income during Danton's boyhood, but we 
know that the office which was afterwards purchased for 
him was worth some three to four thousand pounds ; that 
the money was found largely upon the credit of his 
father's legacy,^ and that the house in which the family 
lived was their own — a useful rule existing throughout 
provincial France. It is a substantial building, among 
the best of the little town, standing in the market-place, 
with the principal rooms giving upon the public square. 
What with the probable capital and the known emolu- 
ments of his position, we may regard Jacques Danton as a 
man disposing of an income of about four to five hundred 
pounds a year. 

His mother was of a somewhat lower rank. She was 
the daughter of a builder from the Champagne, and 
her brother was a master-carpenter of the town. Of 
her two sisters, one had married a postmaster and the 
other a shopkeeper, both in Troyes ; her brother was the 
priest of Barberey, near Arcis. 

The father died when the boy was two and a half 

^ See the action of the relatives in No. VI. of the Appendix. 



44 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

years old, leaving four children. We must presume, 
though we are not certain, that Danton had one brother : 
and we know he had two sisters, one of whom married in 
Troyes ; the other died a nun at the same place in the 
middle of this century.-^ 

On both sides of his family, through the connections 
and marriages of his relations, their employment, their 
dwellings, their descendants, we see the origin of Danton 
absolutely separate from the lower and from the higher 
ranks of the old regime. Only by an effort of imagina- 
tion could he later understand the workman or the 
peasant; only by daily conversation could he appreciate 
the strange nobles of 1790, with their absence of national 
pride. 

In fine, Danton came out of that middle class which 
has made the modern world, and which still insecurely 
sustains it. " Respectability and its gig " is an epigram 
that would exactly suit the dull and provincial surround- 
ings of his first home ; but the converse of such pro- 
vincialism is sanity, order, and strength, and out of fuel 
so solid and so cold the bourgeoisie has time and again 
built a consuming fire. 

From his father's death, before he was three years 
old, till his ninth year, the child was with his mother in 
the house at Arcis, for she had from the little fortune 
just enough revenue to keep the family together and to 
educate the children. The little boy was taught his 
Latin elements in the town, and then sent to the " Lower 
Seminary" at Troyes.^ 

It was the intention of his uncle at Barberey to 
make him a priest, and in that case he would have passed 
through the regular stages, taking the higher forms in 

^ Bougeart, p. 12. A Danton, who was presumably the son of this 
brother, was an inspector of the University under the second Empire. 

2 See Appendix No. V. ; also Thedtre de I'Ancien College de Troyes, 
Babeau, published by Dufour-Bouquet, Troyes, i83i. 



THE YOUTH OF DANTON 45 

the Upper Seminary, and finally being admitted to orders 
a year or two after finishing his " Philosophie." However, 
this programme was never completed, and the Church 
lost in him the material for a vigorous, charitable, and 
obscure country vicar. 

The decision was probably the result of one of those 
family meetings, such as were habitually held in France 
to decide the career of an orphan child, and which the 
Revolution raised to the dignity of an institution with 
legal form. Some biographers have read the politics of a 
man of thirty into the action of a little child, and have 
made this step a precocious protest against clericalism. 
These biographers have no children. 

The uncle consented to the change, and, with Madame 
Danton's two married sisters, agreed upon the bar as his 
future profession. He was sent to Troyes and placed 
with the Oratorians, a religious order which has had the 
honour of training so many of the great reformers. In 
their College he went through that training which no 
amount of social change or new theories in pedagogy has 
been able to uproot from the secondary education of 
France. Little Greek, much Latin, two years all employed 
in the literature of the late Roman republic and early 
empire — a groundwork in the elements which gives the 
educated French an almost mediaeval familiarity with 
Roman thought ; such was the course which the bour- 
geois did and does go through in the French schools. A 
system founded upon the humanities of the sixteenth, 
but developed in the classicism of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, it has lost the Hellenism, the subtlety, and the 
breadth of the former, while it has preserved the rigidity, 
the strength, and the clearness which the latter owes to 
the influence of the Jesuits. It fails to develop that 
initiative coupled with originality to which we in England 
attach so much importance ; it achieves, upon the other 
hand, a strength in the convictions, and above all a 



46 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

soundness in the judgment, whidi our public schools 
often fail to produce. 

From just such a curriculum came the exaggerated 
classicism of Robespierre, the more brilliant but equally- 
Latin style of Desmoulins, though it must be admitted 
that the first is a reminiscence of Cornelius Nepos, while 
the second is at times well modelled upon Tacitus him- 
self. The error of such imitation, however, never marred 
the speech of Danton in his later life; he owed this 
singular freedom from the spirit of his age to travel, to 
his vivid interest in surrounding things and men, and to 
his intimacy with English and Italian/ 

Yet in a famous speech upon public education he 
makes a just reference to the influence of this schooling 
upon the mind of his contemporaries, and notes truly its 
tendency to turn men republican.^ 

Unfortunately he did not remain at such a school 
long enough to receive its last and most beneficial im- 
pressions. The head form at a French school is called 
" Philosophie," and the last year is spent largely in read- 
ing the sociology and the metaphysics of the old world. 
Danton left at the age of sixteen, when he had just com- 
pleted " Rhetorique," but what he lost in polishing he 
gained in being left to his own development for one more 
year of his life than were his fellows. 

Active, often rebellious, full of laughter, he showed 
his intelligence in the final examinations, his vigour in an 
escapade that endeared him to at least one of his school- 
fellows,^ who has given us, with Rousselin, the only notes 
we possess as to this period of his life. He ran off in his 
last year to Rheims, seventy odd miles away, that he 
might see the crowning of Louis XVI. Going and return- 

^ See list of his library, Appendix VIII., and his interview with 
Thomas Payne, at the beginning of Chapter VII. 

2 Speech of August 13, 1793. Printed in Moniteur of August 15. 
8 M. B6on. 



THE YOUTH OF DANTON 47 

ing on foot, he satisfied tlie desire wliicli lie had expressed 
to his school-fellows of " seeing how they made a king." 
So as a boy he went to look at the making of a king, and 
afterwards, when he grew older, Danton himself unmade 
him. 

In 1780 — his twenty-first year^ — he entered the 
ofl&ce of a solicitor at Paris named Vinot. Apprenticed as 
a clerk in order to read law, and above all to watch the 
procedure of the courts, he spent the next four years in 
preparing for the bar. If we are to depend on a chance 
phrase dropped just before his death, he was at that time 
entirely dependent on his master and his pen.^ We know, 
at any rate, that he received no salary, but lodged and 
boarded with his employer; nor is it probable that he 
received any money from home, for his mother had 
married again, and a short time after this second hus- 
band (a certain Recordain) was so deeply involved that 
Danton was begged to hand over the most part of his 
inheritance to save the family. He did so, and remained 
with some five or six hundred pounds only as his share 
of the family fortune. It was invested in land near 
Arcis, and he kept it for his ultimate purpose of buying 
a barrister's practice in one of the higher courts. 

He was called to the bar (a process in the same form 
as taking a degree) in 1785,^ choosing, with provincial 
patriotism, Rheims as the place in which formally to 
join the profession; but he intended to practise in the 
capital, and returned thither at once. 

It is not easy to render to an English public the 
meaning of the various courts before 1789. Even in 
France (so completely has the new order supplanted the 
old anarchy) their forms have been forgotten, and 
research purely antiquarian cannot give us more than 

^ Danton, Homme d'Etat, p. 29. 

^ See "Notes of Courtois de I'Aube " in Clar^tie's " Desmonlins." 

^ Danton, Homme d'Atat, p. 30. 



48 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

disjointed particulars as to their procedure.^ There was 
a division corresponding to the Enghsh between Common 
Law and Equity. This was to be discovered in every 
country of the West, and had arisen of necessity from 
the imposition of the king's power and the Canon Law 
over those local customs, mixed with reminiscences of 
Rome, which had once been the whole life of the early 
Middle Ages. 

To the body of lawyers who in Paris (or in any of the 
great centres) formed the courts for all ordinary pleas, 
the name of " Parhament " was given. But that it com- 
prised more persons, that it never went upon circuit, and 
that it included many barristers as well as judges, the 
Parliament of Paris corresponded more or less to what 
the English Bench would be were our judges to form a 
kind of permanent council for advising the Crown and 
registering its decrees, as well as for trying the cases 
brought before them. To plead at their bar was no 
difficult matter. It required but the taking of one's 
degree in law, and the fees of entrance were slight. 
Danton determined to adopt this branch of the profes- 
sion, and to use it as a stepping-stone towards the higher 
court, which he soon reached. 

This higher court, " Court of Appeal," as we should call 
it, or " Cour de Cassation," as it is named in the modern 
French system, bore a title significant of the intense 
conservatism of old France. It was called the " Court 
of the King's Councils" — very much what we should 
have to-day in England had we preserved in fact the 
theory that the king in his council is the final authority. 
But though it bore a name drawn from the Curia Regis 
of the thirteenth century, it had of course lost all its old 
simplicity. It was a Bench like any other, but there 

^ An excellent reading is afforded by the Avocat aux Conseils du Roi of 
H. Bos (Macbal & Billaud, Paris, iSSi), quoted more than once in this 
work. 



THE YOUTH OF DANTON 49 

pleaded at its bar an order of lawyers strictly limited 
in number and bigbly privileged/ It dealt, as did its 
parallel in the English system, mainly with disputed 
inheritances, especially in matters of land, and, as we 
shall see, it showed the true mark of a court of Chancery, 
in that it took more than a hundred and thirty years to 
make up its mind. To plead before this court, with its. 
monopoly of valuable causes, was to have at once an 
assured income and prestige; therefore its vacancies 
were prizes to be bought and sold. Danton determined 
to plead so long at the common law courts as might 
assure him, with economy, a substantial addition to the 
few hundred pounds that formed his whole capital, and 
then to seek a loan that might eke out these savings 
and place him at the Chancery bar. 

Young, eloquent, eminently capable of seeing a real 
issue, he was well fitted for the lower practice, and he 
succeeded. Within two years he had a sum to offer as 
part payment, which was at once a proof of his business 
habits and of his talents. His family, therefore, especially 
those members of it who had urged him to go to the 
bar, were willing to advance the necessary sums in addi- 
tion to his own savings and his little patrimony. The 
purchase-money was delivered, and a bond to the amount 
of ;^3000 (a sum which he could not then have furnished) 
was signed by his aunts and uncles at Troyes. It was 
in March 1787^ that this step was taken, and this date 
was in some sense his entry into public life, for it brought 
him into dhect contact with the wealthy — that is, with 
the ruling class. 

We have on this date a vivid anecdote surviving. 
A Latin oration had to be delivered off-hand to the 
assembled college on the reception of a candidate to 

* Since 1728 membership of this body had been purchasable and 
hereditary ; a striking example of how wrongly society was moving. 
2 See Appendix VI. 

D 



so THE LIFE OF DANTON 

the order. The subject sat for Danton when he entered 
the hall was " The Moral and Political Situation of the 
Country in their relations with the Administration of 
Justice." A fine tbeme for 1787 ! Such a quaint scene 
the old regime delighted in, and its older members de- 
lighted also in catching here and there a phrase of 
quotation which they could understand. The genius 
and the memory of their candidate seem on this occa- 
sion to have furnished something new, to have given 
them less platitude than was expected. He mentioned 
reform; he spoke of the struggle in which the Parlia- 
ment was engaged against the ministers — a struggle of 
which he wisely said, " They are fighting for the sacred 
centres of civic Hberty, but present no positive reform 
by which that liberty may be brought into existence." 
"Sacred centres" was, of course, am et focis. The 
speech was necessarily in a large measure a series of 
clicMs, a stringing together of the well-worn Latin 
mottoes. It even contained salus populi suprema lex, but 
its argument was Danton's own. There is to be marked 
also this phrase, for it is the note of all his future work : 
"Let the government feel the gravity of the situation 
sufficiently to remedy it in the simple and in the natural 
way downwards from its own authority." 

The young men understood and applauded ; the old 
men were assured that, if they had not quite followed 
an unconventional harangue, it was due to the originality 
of the speaker. Presumably their souls were softened 
by arts et focis, and salus populi suprema lex." 

For the next two years his forensic reputation is 
continually rising. No longer the Common Law pleader, 
with pathetic and oratorical appeals for a shepherd against 
his lord, he had shown how large a part intellect had to 
do with his power of commanding attention. On the 
intricacies of his Chancery practice and the clearness 
and ability of his analysis we have an excellent witness 



THE YOUTH OF DANTON 51 

in one of the most learned of the modern Parisian bar/ 
and three of his opinions, on the Amelinau, Dubonis, and 
De Montbarey cases, have come down to us, and have 
received the favourable criticism of an opponent. 

The last case (that of De Montbarey) shows us Danton 
defending the claims of an old house and at work in the 
rustiest of all the legal grooves. It had been on the 
stocks since 1657, and Danton, in attempting to give 
the quietus to this intolerable longevity, uses a phrase 
which shows us the feeling that spared one grave 
at least when the mob sacked St. Denis : " Jeanne 
d'Albret ^ is a name dear to all Frenchmen, for it recalls 
the memory of that other Jeanne d'Albret who wa? the 
mother of Henri IV." 

There came to be his clients, among others De 
Barentin, the minister of justice, and De Brienne,^ cr «ip- 
troUer-general ; it is on his intimacy with the for^uer 
that his first recorded opinions on public affairs turn. 
They will be dealt with in the next chapter. 

It is, of course, difficult to give an exact proof of a 
man's private income at any moment, but we are certain 
that Danton's cannot have fallen far short at this date 
of a thousand pounds a year. His immediate success 
at the bar, the monopoly and privilege of the body to 
which he now belonged (the work certain to como to 
the most inept was worth a lump sum of 60,000 francs, 
to which talent would add indefinitely), his eloquence 
and proved ability, the name of his clients, their im- 
portance and their wealth — everything leads to this as 
a certain conclusion. Immense fortunes were not then 
made in the profession ; his position was not an obscare 
one. 

He married, on attaining this status, the daughter of 
a man who kept one of the students' restaurants, Cht\r- 

^ M. Bos, quoted above. 2 ibid., p. 520. 

3 See Appendix V. 



52 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

pentier by name. It was a caf^ (Caf6 des !ficoles) very 
much, frequented by tbe University and the younger men 
at the bar, and still one of the few remaining caf^s of the 
last century. Danton himseK was a regular customer, 
and there is an interesting picture, drawn by a friend, of 
the avocats in their special costumes at this place. It 
occupied the site of what is now the south-western corner 
of the Place de I'Ecole,-^ nor has any change been made 
in it save the raising of the road level. Looking on the 
river, and just over the river from the Palais, it was the 
natural rendezvous for the young barristers in the mid-day 
adjournment and after the court rose. 

Charpentier, the "limonadier" of Mdme. Koland, 
was a man worth from five to six thousand pounds, 
part only invested in his business;^ he had, moreover, 
a little post under the Taxes, requiring a slight amount 
of work and bringing in only a hundred pounds a year. 
When he married his daughter to Danton, she was given 
20,000 francs.^ 

As will be seen later, it is of the first moment in 
proving Danton's position to know accurately the capital 
amount of which he disposed when the Revolution broke 
out; for in the case of generous men in a democracy, 
the accusation of venality is the most common and the 
hardest to rebut. 

Passionately fond of his wife, and successful in his 
profession, on the threshold of a great career, I would 
appty to him a phrase which one of his worst enemies 
has given us to describe a far lesser man, " Actif et sain, 
robuste et glorieux, il aim a sa femme et la parure." 

We leave him, then, at the summit of a laborious and 
perhaps of an arduous youth. He is twenty-eight years 
old, in the best of his vigour and of his intelligence — 

^ See Appendix II. on Danton's lodgings in Paris. 
8 See Robinet, Dcmton vie Privie, p. 284. 
• See Appendix VI. 



THE YOUTH OF DANTON 53 

the age at which Jefferson ten years before had drafted 
his immortal paragraph ; the age at which Napoleon, with 
his moving island of men, was ten years later to break 
five armies of the Austrians from Lodi to Campo Formio. 

What picture shall we make of him to carry with 
us in the scenes in which he is to be the principal actor ? 

He was tall and stout, with the forward bearing of 
the orator, full of gesture and of animation. He carried 
a round French head upon the thick neck of energy. 
His face was generous, ugly, and determined. With wide 
eyes and calm brows, he yet had the quick glance which 
betrays the habit of appealing to an audience. His 
upper lip was injured, and so was his" nose,^ and he had 
further been disfigured by the small-pox, with which 
disease that forerunner of his, Mirabeau, had also been 
disfigured. His Up had been torn by a bull when he was 
a child, and his nose crushed in a second adventure, 
they say, with the same animal. In this the Romans 
would perhaps have seen a portent; but he, the idol of 
our Positivists, found only a chance to repeat Mirabeau's 
expression that his " boar's head frightened men." 

In his dress he had something of the negligence 
which goes with extreme vivacity and with a constant 
interest in things outside oneself; but it was invariably 
that of his rank. Indeed, to the minor conventions 
Danton always bowed, because he was a man, and because 
he was eminently sane. More than did the run of men 
at that time, he understood that you cut down no tree 
by lopping at the leaves, nor break up a society by throw- 
ing away a wig.^ The decent self-respect which goes 

^ By nature his nose was small. His was one of those fa' es rarely seen, 
and always associated with energy and with leadership, whose great fore- 
heads overhang a face that would be small, were it not redeemed by the 
square jaw and the mouth. Thus Arnault, "une caricature de Socrate." 

^ I refer to the English reformer who, on taking ship at Bristol, cast 
his perruque into the water, crying, "I have done with such baubles," and 
sailed bald to the New World. 



54 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

witli conscious power was never absent from his costume, 
though it often left his language in moments of crisis, or 
even of irritation. 

I will not insist too much upon his great character 
of energy, because it has been so over-emphasised as to 
give a false impression of him. He was admirably sus- 
tained in his action, and his political arguments were as 
direct as his physical efforts were continuous, but the banal 
picture of fury which is given you by so many writers is 
false. For fury is empty, whereas Danton was full, and 
his energy was at first the force at work upon a great 
mass of mind, and later its momentum. 

Save when he had the direct purpose of convincing 
a crowd, his speech had no violence, and even no metaphor; 
in the courts he was a close reasoner, and one who put 
his points with ability and with eloquence rather than 
with thunder. But in whatever he undertook, vigour 
appeared as the taste of salt in a dish. He could not 
quite hide this vigour : his convictions, his determination, 
his vision all concentrate upon whatsoever thing he has 
in hand. 

He possessed a singularly wide view of the Europe 
in which France stood. In this he was like Mirabeau, 
and peculiarly unlike the men with whom revolutionary 
government threw him into contact. He read and spoke 
English, he was acquainted with Italian. He knew that 
the kings were dilettanti, that the theory of the aristo- 
cracies was liberal. He had no little sympathy with the 
philosophy which a leisurely oligarchy had framed in 
England ; it is one of the tragedies of the Revolution 
that he desired to the last an alliance, or at least peace, 
with this country. Where Robespierre was a maniac in 
foreign policy, Danton was more than a sane — he was a 
just, and even a diplomatic man. 

He was fond of wide reading, and his reading was of 
the philosophers ; it ranged from Rabelais to the physio- 



THE YOUTH OF DANTON 55 

crats in his own tongue, from Adam Smith to tlie "Essay- 
on Civil Government " in that of strangers ; and of the 
Encyclopaedia he possessed all the numbers steadily accu- 
mulated. When we consider the time, his fortune, and 
the obvious personal interest in so small and individual a 
collection, few shelves will be found more interesting 
than those which Danton delighted to fill.-^ 

In his politics he desired above all actual, practical, 
and apparent reforms; changes for the better expressed 
in material results. He differed from many of his 
countrymen at that time, and from most of his political 
countrymen now, in thus adopting the tangible. It was 
a part of something in his character which was nearly 
allied to the stock of the race, something which made 
him save and invest in land as does the French peasant,^ 
and love, as the French peasant loves, good government, 
order, security, and well-being. 

There is to be discovered in all the fragments which 
remain to us of his conversations before the bursting of 
the storm, and still more clearly in his demand for a 
centre when the invasion and the rebellion threatened the 
Kepublic, a certain conviction that the revolutionary 
thing rather than the revolutionary idea should be pro- 
duced : not an inspiring creed, but a goal to be reached, 
sustained him. Like all active minds, his mission was 
rather to realise than to plan, and his energies were 
determined upon seeing the result of theories which he 
unconsciously admitted, but which he was too impatient 
to analyse. 

His voice was loud even when his expressions were 
subdued. He talked no man down, but he made many 
opponents sound weak and piping after his utterance. 
It was of the kind that fills great halls, and whose deep 
note suggests hard phrases. There was with all this a 
carelessness as to what his words might be made to mean 

^ See AH>endix VIII. * See Appendix IX. 



S6 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

when partially repeated by others, and such carelessness 
has caused historians still more careless to lend a false 
aspect of Bohemianism to his character. A Bohemian 
he was not ; he was a successful and an orderly man ; but 
energy he had, and if there are writers who cannot con- 
ceive of energy without chaos, it is probably because in 
the studious leisure of vast endowments they have never 
felt the former in themselves, nor have been compelled 
to control the latter in their surroundings. 

As to his private life, affection dominated him. Upon 
the faith of some who did not know him he acquired the 
character of a debauchee. For the support of this view 
there is not a tittle of direct evidence. He certainly loved 
those pleasures of the senses which Kobespierre refused, 
and which Roland was unable to enjoy; but that his 
good dinners were orgies or of any illegitimate loves 
(once he had married the woman to whom he was so 
devotedly attached) there is no shadow of proof. His 
friends also he loved, and above all, from the bottom 
of his soul, he loved France. His faults — and they were 
many — his vices (and a severe critic would have dis- 
covered these also) flowed from two sources : first, he 
was too little of an idealist, too much absorbed in the 
immediate thing ; secondly, he suffered from all the evil 
effects that abundant energy may produce — the habit of 
oaths, the rhetoric of sudden diatribes, violent and over- 
strained action, with its subsequent demand for repose. 

Weighted with these conditions he enters the arena, 
supported by not quite thirty fruitful years, by a happy 
marriage, by an intense conviction, and by the talents 
of a man who has not yet tasted defeat. I repeat the 
sentence applied to another : " Active and sane, robust 
and ready for glory, the things he loved were his wife 
and the circumstance of power.". 



CHAPTER III 

DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 

A MAN who is destined to represent at any moment the 
chief energies of a nation, especially a man who will not 
only represent but lead, must, by his nature, follow the 
national methods on his road to power. 

His career must be nearly parallel (so to speak) with 
the direction of the national energies, and must merge 
with their main current at an imperceptible angle. It is 
the chief error of those who deliberately plan success that 
they will not leave themselves amenable to such influences, 
and it is the most frequent cause of their failure. Thus 
such men as arrive at great heights of power are most 
often observed to succeed by a kind of fatality, which is 
nothing more than the course of natures vigorous and 
original, but, at the same time, jdelding unconsciously to 
an environment with which they sympathise, or to which 
they were bom. 

It is not difficult to determine the accidents of action, 
temperament, and locality which predispose to success in 
one's own society. It is less easy to appreciate what cor- 
responds to them under foreign conditions. 

It was seen in the first chapter that Paris sums up in 
herself those conditions in the case of the French nation ; 
and it was seen also (a point of peculiar importance) that 
Paris at the close of the eighteenth century was ill at ease 
— out of herself, demanding her place and yet anxious as 
to the means by which it might be attained. 

It might be imagined that this was a kind of usurpa- 



58 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

tion. Such a belief is entertained by most foreigners, and 
certainly it has not been lacking among the more idealist 
of the French Kepublicans. Nevertheless, such a view is 
erroneous, and the Girondists, for all their virtues, went 
(as we shall discover) against the nature of things when 
they would have made of Paris but one of the cities, or 
rather but " an aliquot voting part " of the nation. The 
demand of Paris was essentially reasonable, and had to be 
satisfied. Why ? Because without her leadership not this 
thing or that thing would have been done, but nothing 
would have been done. The crowds who waited round 
the coaching inns in the country towns for news of the 
city in the great early days of '89, by their very attitude 
asked and expected Paris to move. 

Paris, then, is Danton's gate. It is up the flood of 
the Parisian tide that he floats. That tide rises much 
higher than even he had thought possible, and it throws 
him at last on the high inaccessible place of the loth of 
August. Once there, from a pinnacle he sees all France. 
Just as Cromwell was the Puritan soldier till he reached 
power, and then became, or desired to become, the repre- 
sentative of England, so Danton is the Parisian Frondeur 
till from a place of responsibility and direction he aims 
partly at the realisation of French ideas, but mainly at the 
integrity and salvation of France itself. 

Here he is, then, in the two years of active discussion 
that precede the elections, by an accident of ambition, 
Parisian ; one of a group of young provincial lawyers, 
but the most successful of them all. Some months after 
his marriage, in the course of 1788^ (we are not certain 

^ From the Almanaoh Royal of 1788. Dr. Eobinet, whose opportunities 
of information are unique, tells us that he first moved into the Rue 
des Fosses St. Germains, and later into the Cour du Commerce, some time 
in 1790. The statement as to the first direction is unaccompanied by any 
authority, but Dr. Robinet possesses a letter with this address on it ; now 
here the definite information of an ofiicial list seems to me of the greatest 
weight. 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 59 

of the exact date), he moved into the house in which he 
Hved to his death, six angry years. It was the corner 
house of the Cour du Commerce and the Rue des Cor- 
dehers/ The house was better than that which he had 
inhabited in the Rue des Mauvaises Paroles, when he 
bought his practice ; on the other hand, it was in a some- 
what less expensive neighbourhood. We may justly infer, 
however, from the greater size of his new apartments, 
and from the fact that he kept his office still in the old 
house in the Rue de la Tixanderie, just behind the Hotel 
de Ville, that he had prospered in his profession, and the 
inference is sustained by our knowledge of the impor- 
tance of his cases and his clients. As to the exact 
situation which he chose, it was doubtless determined 
by its proximity to the apartments of his friends. Here 
lived Desmoulins, his chief friend, a year younger than 
himself, coming (after his marriage in 1790) to live in the 
same house ; for then, as now, in Paris it was not the habit 
to take a whole house but a flat, and Danton was on the 
first, Desmoulins on the second floor. Just across the 
river, over the Pont Neuf, was the cafs^ on the Quai de 
rficole which his father-in-law had kept, and above all, he 
was here in the midst of the youth of the schools. It 
was the slope of the famous hill of the University. Close 
by he would find the Caf^ Procope, of which Desmoulins 
had written with such enthusiasm, which had once been 
illuminated with the little smile of Voltaire, which had 
heard the assertion of Diderot, and which in 1788 was 
noisy every night with discussion and speech and applause. 
All that atmosphere of debate which comes unconsciously 
to young men learning rose on the sides of the Mont 
Parnasse and centred in the room ; and here in the 
winter of the year, in a society so entirely of his own 
rank that the high bourgeoisie and the noblesse knew 

^ See Appendices II. and VII. Some rooms look on the Eue des Cor- 
deliers, some on the Cour du Commerce. 



6o THE LIFE OF DANTON 

nothing of its power, his great voice and generous face 
filled the circle with their energy. But there was yet 
no dream of revolution, still less of violence. France 
was waiting for great things, but they were to come of 
themselves, or on the wave of universal enthusiasm. The 
fire, however, was lit, and the group which afterwards 
passed from the Montague to the scaffold of Germinal 
was already formed. 

To all this, however, which was but the relaxation of 
an abundant spirit, must be added days of continual and 
serious work on the other side of the river. If his nights 
were in the Latin Quarter, his days were in the ofiice of 
the Kue de la Tixanderie. A minister of the crown ^ does 
not intrust his family affairs to such a wastrel as the 
chance memoirs of opponents would make of Danton at 
this period, nor a lawyer who is never in his chambers, 
but gadding about politicising, get the conduct of one of 
the most important Chancery cases of his day. 

There is one matter in these pre-revolutionary months 
which is of no very great importance, but which is well 
worth noticing, though the confusion apparent in our one 
account of it has lessened its value. There can be no 
doubt that Barentin, apart from his business relations, 
was personally intimate with Danton; and when that 
careful and moderate man had succeeded Lamoignon in 
September 1788, there was some kind of informal offer 
made to Danton of what we should call an official secre- 
taryship to the minister^ — or rather we have no name 
for it, for the ministry in France was not associated with 
legislation, but only with executive power, and therefore 
positions in its gifts had not the political importance they 
have with us. 

As to the precise date of the offer, how far it was 

1 De Barentin. See preceding chapter and Appendix V. He became 
Danton's client just before the decree that summoned the States-General. 
^ Secretaire du Sceau. 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 6i 

pressed, or how seriously it was made, we can have no 
exact knowledge. But it seems to me unwise to reject so 
characteristic an anecdote, and one which fits in so well 
with Danton's known position, merely on the somewhat 
strained theory that documentary evidence alone should 
be admitted in history, and documentary evidence sifted 
by the rules of a rigid cross-examination.^ 

At any rate, Danton refused it. And not only did he 
refuse it, but there is no trace of an attempt to use his 
friend's influence or to make a political success at a time 
when nearly every man's head was turned by the chances 
of a great social change. He felt no need of politics, and 
it was not till much later, after quite twelve months of 
action and speech, that his oratory found foothold, and ho 
felt the imperious appetites of a new power. Success in 
his profession was without question the one ambition 
which occupied him in the close of 1788, it was an 
ambition closely bound up with that business sense which 
was a strong element in the sane and practical mind of 
the Champenois lawyer. 

It was upon him and his group of friends, in a Paris 
that every day grew keener in its discussion and atten- 
tion, that the long-expected decree of the 27 th of Dec- 
ember fell. There were to be elections. Paris, all 
pamphleteered to death, but inclining as a whole to the 
moderate criticism of the more practical men, was at last 
called upon to act. 

Many conditions must be made clear before we can 
understand the effect of these elections upon the history 
of the next three years. In the first place, France was 
suffering from a great material evil : she was going bank- 
rupt, her agriculture was hopelessly depressed, her indus- 

^ See Appendix V., Eousselin. The anecdote is little esteemed by 
Anlard, but is admitted to be of value by other biographers. Aulard relies 
for his opinion upon the undoubted errors in the matter of date. But 
Rousselin may have been right in the main, though (writing many years 
after) mistaken in the matter of a month or so. 



62 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

tries ruined, and thousands and thousands of men out of 
work were wandering about the streets of the cities. In 
the second place, the class which was going to vote for 
the Commons was the tax-paying class. And in the 
third place, the voting was by two degrees. I name 
these three conditions as qualifying a broad and often 
erroneous impression. I do not mean that the ideals 
were not abroad; all the world knows how bright the 
eyes of the young men were getting, and we are all 
familiar with Desmoulins, eager, passionate, stuttering 
but voluble, and passing from group to group as they 
discussed or dreamed. But it is too common to read the 
spirit of '93 into those elections of '89, and the error is 
a grievous one. As well might you interpret the spirit 
of an eloquent man who is about to defend a just and 
practical cause by hearing what he said later in the day, 
should his opponents have taken to fists and fought him 
heavily for several hours. 

The immediate need was fiscal ; the class called upon 
to meet it were the middle class; the men they were 
about to elect were of professional rank. 

The electoral units and all corporations were asked to 
state their grievances before the gathering of the Parlia- 
ment, and it is in these " cahiers " that the spirit of the 
time is best discovered. The abstractions, the phrases, 
the great general conceptions are found (as we might 
have expected, though it comes as a new thing) mainly in 
the complaints of the clergy and nobility ; the peasant, the 
bourgeois, and the artisan have a more material grievance. 

Thus the nobility of Caen in their cahier talk of the 
" National Contract," and the clergy of Forez (after some 
remarks on the care and cleansing of ponds) end up with 
an admirable little essay on individual liberty, its limits 
and proper extension.-^ The nobility of Nantes and of 

^ E. Champion, La France en i^Sg. Esprit des Cahiers in La Revolution 
(Hist. Oenerale, viii.). 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 63 

Meulan talk roundly of the " rights of man," ^ and gene- 
rally this order calls for a Constitution — of which word 
they had in a very short time supped and dined. With 
lesser men the demands are rather for sublunary things, 
but the complaints that made Beugnot laugh give a good 
picture. " To have one's dogs killed if necessary but not 
hamstrung, to be allowed to keep a cat, to be allowed 
to light a fire without paying dues, to sell one's wine 
when one liked;" and from the bourgeoisie, regular 
trial, abolition of lettres de cachet, the old European 
policy that the growth of rich corporations should be 
checked and much of their property confiscated, the 
equalisation of taxation — such are the points upon which 
(a mere redress) the great bulk of Frenchmen were 
determined. One might sum up and say, "They de- 
manded the freedom and common justice obtainable in 
the modern State." But the privileged orders, for all 
their phrases, resisted when the time for reform was 
come, and their friction lit the flame of the ideal, 
disastrously for themselves and happily for the world. 

As for the cahier sent from the electoral district of 
Paris in which Danton lived, it was destroyed by the 
Commune when they burnt the Hotel de Ville in 1 8 7 1 . 
We know, however,^ that it demanded " the destruction 
of the Bastille," a symbolic act ever present to the minds 
of Parisians, and, for the matter of that, by several cahiers 
of the provincial noblesse and clergy. There is no 
direct documentary evidence that Danton helped to draw 
up this cahier, but I cannot believe that a man of such 
influence in so small a space and among (comparatively) 
.so few voters^ had nothing to do with the framing of 
this document, especially when we consider the cry he 

1 Ibid. 

^ Aulard, who quotes Chassin, Les Elections de Paris, vol. ii, p. 478. 
M. Aulard tells us that M. Chassin saw the document himself before the 
war. 

^ Less than six hundred. 



64 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

gave as a boy, swimming in tlae river just beneath the 
walls of the prison.^ There is, however, nothing to prove 
it, and he certainly took no memorable part in an action 
where all was tranquil and even tedious. 

The mention, however, of the districts of Paris, and 
especially of that which could claim Danton, makes very 
necessary a view of that focus of revolutionary energy. It 
was called the district of the Cordeliers. It was small, one 
of the smallest of the sixty into which Paris was divided, 
yet it contained the very strongest of the brains and 
eloquence of its time, very few nobles, and, for the matter 
of that, very few of the artisans and hardly any of the pro- 
letariat. Later, when Danton threatened the reactionaries 
with the populace, it was not to the district of the Cor- 
deliers, but to the Faubourg St. Marceau that he appealed; 
for the workmen were rare in its ancient, narrow streets, 
with their tall houses and little dark courts framing each 
some relic of the Middle Ages. Here were found many of 
the clergy, but- above all a swarm of the young lawyers 
and students, the class that think high and hard and 
breed thoughts in others, a kind of little united clan 
of what was strongest in the youth of the University and 
the professions ; and the whole homogeneous group centred 
round Danton. 

If you stood in the Cour du Commerce in Danton's 
time, and looked north to where his house made the 
corner of the narrow entry, you would have seen a main 
street only a trifle broader than the court, and running 
at right angles. Standing in the mouth of the narrow 
passage, you would have seen on the other side of the 
main street, and a hundred yards up it, a little fifteenth- 
century turret, capped with a pointed slate roof and 
jutting outward on round supports.^ This was the ex- 

^ Appendix V. 

^ This description is taken from a contemporary water-colour sketch 
■which I have seen in the collection of Dr. Eobinet. 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 6$ 

treme angle of an old convent called the Cordeliers.^ 
Here tlie Franciscans had settled in St. Louis's time, five 
hundred years before, but the walls you would have seen 
were not of the thirteenth, but rather of the early four- 
teenth century, while the church which flanked the 
street was of the sixteenth, and additions had been made 
of all periods. As you came out of the Cour du Com- 
merce and went up the street, you would have the convent 
running all along the opposite side, from the little turret 
on the corner to the church of St. Come in the Rue de la 
Harpe, save where it was interrupted by private houses, 
and where it was broken in one place by a little lane 
leading to the hall of the University College, which the 
convent supported. Like so many great foundations, this 
rich place was in full decay, and the vaulted hall, with 
its dim hght and resonant echoes, was given over to the 
meeting of the district, and later to the thunder of the 
voice that threw back the armies of Europe. Alone of 
all the mediaeval buildings of the Cordeliers this hall 
remains to-day as the Mus^e Dupuytren. 

There is yet one further point to be mentioned before 
we can make a complete picture of Danton's position 
before these elections of 1789. There can be no doubt 
that the Masonic lodges had proved a powerful instrument 
in the preparation of opinion, and though our information 
on their formation in Paris is scanty, we can safely affirm 
that Danton belonged to the lodge of the " Nine Sisters," 
which included such members as Sieyes or Bailly on the 
one hand and CoUot D'Herbois on the other.^ It would 
be foolish to over-estimate the influence of these societies. 
The subsequent history of their members proves quite 
clearly that the bond between them was slight (who can, 
for instance, reproach Desmoulins with a secret support of 

' See Appendix I. 

® See the discussion of the somewhat meagre authorities in Eobinet, 
Danton, Homme d'Etat, pp. 37-40. 



e^ THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Bailly ?), and (wtat is mucli more important) the very 
character of their composition disproves effectually any 
secret or prearranged action. The foolish Bailly, the 
learned Siey^s, the admirable, unpractical, high-minded 
Condorcet, the weak Garat, CoUot D'Herbois the potential 
Ked, all members of one lodge ! They can have been 
little more than associations whose character of mutual 
help and whose opportunities of club-life (that comfort so 
lacking in Paris) attracted men. They were authorised, 
and were one of the very few kinds of refuge from a 
society where political discussion had decayed and where 
combined action was almost unknown. 

This is all the importance, I think, which should be 
attached to them. Where men are free, and where the 
suffrage is open and common, secret societies may very 
justly be dreaded; their action will be at all times 
separate from that of society in general, and may be in 
a hidden antagonism to the will of the nation. But in 
a society where reunion, discussion, and all that is the 
blood of civic political life has been exhausted, then, like 
a special drug which cures, they have an excellent use. 
They may, in such societies, just keep alive the habit 
of political conversation and expectancy, and they may 
develop in some at least that organising spirit without 
which a political movement degenerates into anarchy. 

This, then (to recapitulate), is Danton's position just 
before the Parisian elections. He is in the midst of 
what are to be his group of young Revolutionary friends 
on the outskirts of the Latin quarter ; his daily occupa- 
tion is the conducting in his ofl&ce on the north bank 
and at the Palace in the Cit^ of those important pleas in 
the highest court, which bring him into contact with the 
ministers, with the great corporations, and especially with 
the various organs of government of the old regime — for 
it was in cases for and against these that the Conseil du 
Koi came into play. His income is sufficient for his 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 67 

needs and for a slow but methodical payment of the price 
of his practice. It amounted (we may presume) to some- 
thing in the neighbourhood of 25,000 francs, possibly a 
little less, but not much, for it was drawn from one of 
the most important Chancery cases of his day, and his 
clientele, to judge by the names which alone have reached 
us, was wealthy and of influence. He was thoroughly 
well read ; he was not expecting nor planning a political 
career, as were so many of his friends (for instance, Des- 
moulins), but certain characters which he was rapidly 
developing, or rather discovering, in himself were pre- 
paring that career of necessity. He was learning in 
discussion and laughter, first that he was an orator, and 
secondly that his energy suflSced for a whole group of 
men, and that he could avoid leadership only at the 
expense of entire seclusion. In a time of innumerable 
pamphlets, he never put pen to paper outside his pro- 
fession ; and in days that were producing the ardent 
similes of Camille, and that were just beginning to feel 
the ravings of Marat, he wrote nothing but three grave, 
learned, concise, and dull opinions, which were admirable 
in argument, clear in exposition, and tolerable only to 
elderly lawyers. 

As for his politics, he was centred wholly on the 
outward thing. He seems to have lacked almost entirely 
the metaphysic. Here was France all ruined a'^.d every 
day approaching more nearly to disaster ; let her be 
turned into a place where men should be happy, should 
have enough to eat and drink, should be good citizens 
to the extent of making the nation homogeneous and 
strong. Reform should be practical : in part it would 
require discussion, not too much of it. In part, however, 
its lines were laid down for it. Economics taught certain 
truths ; let them be applied. He had read in Adam 
Smith certain indubitable principles of this science; let 
them be used. Science had in such and such matters 



68 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

definite remedies to offer; let them be applied. Such 
were his over-simple aims. He was of the Encyclo- 
paedists. Had he no beliefs, then, in his politics ? Un- 
doubtedly he had ; no man could desire " the good " 
without feeling it. But, like all minds of his type, he 
refused to analyse. His dogmas were all the more 
dogmas because he took them so entirely for granted 
that he refused even to define them. At a time when 
all men had their first principles ready-made in words, 
his was rather that confused instinct which is, after all, 
nearest to the truth. Patriotism, good-fellowship, free- 
dom for his activities, the satisfaction of the thirst for 
knowledge — all these he desired in himself and for the 
State. And that is why you will find his great body at 
the head of mobs and daring criminal things when it is 
a question of saving the nation, or later of breaking an 
inquisitorial idea. It is this simplicity which makes him 
daring, and this concentration on a few obvious points 
which makes him judicious, unscrupulous, and successful 
in the choice of means and of phrases. 

On the 24th of January 1789, the Primaries were 
convened. It was the opportunity for movement, in 
Paris especially, since it was the first definite action after 
so much discussion, attention, and fever. The district 
of the Cordeliers met in the hall of which so much 
mention has been made abv:.ve. But there does not seem 
to have been anything of importance transacted, unless we 
call this important ; I mean the beginnings of the habit 
of reunion and of open discussion. For three months the 
place seems to have had its doors open to the first comer 
of the quarter. The cahier was drawn up here, and the 
rough foundations of what was to be the famous per- 
manent survival of the " Kepublique des Cordeliers " were 
laid. But of Danton's part in all this we have, as I 
have said above, no trace. We can only conjecture and 
infer. 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 69 

It was on April 21 tliat the elections were finally 
held. The voters all met together in the central halls of 
their districts (churches for the most part) and elected 
the electors, who in their turn were to nominate the 
deputies for Paris. Of Danton's role in this important 
action, again we know nothing. M. Bougeart ^ has taken 
it for granted that he was at least "president of the 
district," chairman (as we should say) of the electoral 
meeting ; but he is either in error, or else he is relying 
on some verbal evidence which he has not given us. 
We have no document to prove it, and we know that 
three months later Timbergue and Achimbault, two 
barristers of the district, were successively presidents, not 
Danton.^ What we do know of importance is that the 
Cordeliers were among those districts which did not 
disperse after the elections, but maintained themselves 
as a permanent club. This action by the districts was 
of the very first importance in the history of the Revo- 
lution. It created the municipal movement in July, it 
made Paris an organisation, gave the town a method and 
a voice, and more than any other accident it placed the 
ladder for Danton's feet. 

The elections of Paris once completed, the gates of 
the Revolution are passed, and the States-General, whose 
Commons formulated its first principles, are definitely 
formed ; for Paris completed its voting much later than 
the provinces. The Parliament meets at Versailles, and 
that town presents for the next six months the centre 
of ofiicial interest. But since Paris is going to be, by its 
destiny, the heart of the reform, and since Danton is the 
tribune of Paris, we must, for the purposes of this 
biography, mention the assembly only in its relation to 
what passed in the capital. 

^ Documents authentiques pour servir d VHistoire de la Ricolution Fran^aise 
Danton, par Alfred Bougeart. Brussels, 1861 (La Croix, Van Meenen 
& Cie.). 

^ Aulard, who quotes Charavay, AssembUe electorale de Paris. 



70 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

The tone of Paris during the first two montlis of the 
Parliament \yas, as has been expressed earher in this 
chapter, essentially one of ill-ease and watching. But 
this anxiety of the town took long to find a formula and 
to recognise its own nature. What Paris needed was 
the leadership ; but to hear the confused murmur of the 
thousand voices, you would have thought that all her 
demands were for a number of more or less conflictiug 
ideals. And yet there was no appearance of Party. One 
may say, by a just paradox, that her very cliques made 
for solidarity. The higher bourgeoisie could afford at 
first to ignore the group of the Latin Quarter, thinking 
the young lawyers and students to be merely foolish 
demagogues, not even dangerous. The ears of these last 
were closed to the confused demands of the populace, and 
the orators could honestly believe that ideas rather than 
hunger were to be the goad of change. By great good 
fortune their position was never wholly abandoned, and 
the Revolution from first to last mastered Materialism 
and its attendant Anarchy. Finally, the poor — the out- 
of-work, the starving labourers of the economic crisis 
— standing apart from both these leading classes, could 
convince themselves that the great phrases meant bread, 
and that a constitution was allied in some vague way to a 
lowering ot prices. They were right in that instinct, but, 
with the picturesque inexactitude of mobs, they fearfully 
under-estimated the length of the connecting links. 

The place where the average of these different views 
could best be found was the Palais Royal. Here a great 
popular forum gathered in the gardens which the Duke 
of Orleans had thrown open to the people. It was not a 
bad thing that the debts of this debauchee and adventurer 
had led him to let out the ground-lioor of the wide quad- 
rangle, for the caf^s and shops that surrounded it made 
it a more permanent resort than the squares or gardens 
could have been, and there could be a perpetual mob- 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 71 

parliament held from day to day. Its orators were tlie 
Dantonist group; its instigators, I fear, tlie unprincipled 
men who surrounded D'Orleans, its committee-room and 
centre (as it were) the Cafe Foy. Still, by the action of 
the main virtue of revolutions, the general sense of the 
meeting was stronger than any demagogue; for in such 
times society is not only turbulent but fluid, and while it 
will support a leader who can swim, no mortal force can 
give it any direction other than that which it desires. 

In this great daily crowd Danton was a prominent 
but not a principal figure ; undoubtedly (though we can- 
not prove it by any record) he had begun to speak in his 
district, and we may presume that his voice had been 
heard in the Palais Royal before July ; for just after the 
fall of the Bastille his name is mentioned familiarly. But 
even had he desired to identify himself with the place, 
which is doubtful, his profession would not have per- 
mitted it. He was not briefless, unmarried, and free, 
like Desmoulins, but a man of three years' standing in 
the highest branch of his profession ; doubtless, however, 
he was present daily when the crowd was thickest — I 
mean on the holidays and during the summer evenings. 

All this pamphleteering, discussion, violence, salonis- 
ing, oratory, and anxious criticism, even the mob violence 
which hunger and bad laws had inflamed, found a head 
in the three famous days that followed July 12, 1789. 
All the world knows the story, and even were it unfamiliar 
it would be impossible to treat of it at any length in this 
book, for Danton's name hardly touches it, and our only 
interest here, in connection with his life, is to discover if 
he took part in the street fighting; for the event itself, 
one of the most decisive in history, a few words must 
suffice. 

Paris, and especially the Palais Royal, had been 
watching the struggle at Versailles with gathering anger. 
There, twelve miles off, every purpose for which the Par- 



72 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

liament had met, and every good thing which the elections 
had seemed to ensm-e, lay in jeopardy. Step after step 
the Commons had in fact, though not in their phrases, 
been beaten, and the promises of six months before seemed 
in danger, not through any known or calculable enemy, 
but from the sudden appearance of an opposition which 
the nation, and especially Paris, had ignored. The King 
had retreated from his position of the last December, and 
the privileged orders were sympathising with a growing 
reaction. How far all this was due to the unconstitu- 
tional and unprecedented action of the Commons in in- 
sisting on a General Assembly cannot be discussed here. 
Suffice it to say that, in the opinion of the nation, the 
new departure of the Commons was in thorough accord- 
ance with the spirit, if not with the letter, of the recent 
decrees ; the King was held to have broken his word, and 
the privileged orders to have abandoned their declarations 
in the face of facts. The symbol, though a poor one, of 
the constitutional position was the personality of Necker. 
Conceited, foreign, and common-place, the father of an 
authoress whom neither Napoleon nor posterity could 
tolerate, Genevese and bourgeois to the backbone, this 
mass of impotence yet stood, by one of the ironies of 
history, in the place of an idol. He, the banker, was 
the imagined champion for the moment of that other 
man from Geneva, who had died of persecution ten years 
before, the tender-eyed, wandering, unfortunate Rousseau, 
between whom and him was the distance between a 
financier and an apostle. 

While the king was changing his advisers, and even 
while the foreign troops — fatal error — were being massed 
in wretched insufficiency on the Champ de Mars (not three 
miles from the Palais Royal) Necker still stood like a 
wooden idol, a kind of fetish safeguard against force. He 
just prevented the growing belief in the dissolution from 
becoming a certitude, and on account of his attitude Paris 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 73 

waited. These things being so, the king began his great 
programme of working out the good of his people alone. 
Eel3dng on the three thousand foreigners, a regiment of 
home troops, and practically no guns wherewith to hold 
in check a tortuous city of close on a million souls, the 
king on Saturday, July 1 1 , dismissed Necker. 

Desmoulins first brought the news, running. It was 
the morrow, Sunday, and the Palais Royal was crowded. 
He forgot his stammer and hesitancy, and shouted to the 
great holiday crowd in the gardens to strip the trees for 
emblems, led them as they marched to the Place Louis 
Quinze, saw the French troops defend their fellow-citizens 
against the mounted mercenaries, and heard during a 
night of terror and of civil war the first shots of 
Revolution. 

All the next day, Monday, July 13, 1789, Paris 
organised and prepared. Thanks to the permanence of 
the assemblies in certain districts, a rough machinery was 
ready, and on the 14th, a Tuesday, two great mobs 
determined upon arms. The time is not untainted, for 
St. Huruge was there promising and leading, but if 
D'Orleans was trying to make the most of the adventure, 
he no more created the uprising than a miller makes the 
tide. One stream of men seized the arsenal at the 
Invalides on the west side of the town, the other going 
east in a smaller band demanded arms of the governor 
of the Bastille, a place impossible to take by assault. 
The demand was refused. 

A body of men, however, were permitted to enter the 
courtyard, for which purpose the drawbridge had been 
lowered : once in that trap, De Launay fired upon them 
and shot them down. There is no evidence, nor ever 
will be, as to the motives of that extraordinary act ; but 
to the general people who were gathering and gathering 
all about in the narrow streets, it was an act of deliberate 
treason, part of that spirit with which our own time is 



74 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

not unfamiliar, and wliicli has ruined a hundred reforms, — 
I mean the sentiment that there is no honour to be kept 
between government and insurrection. The misfortune or 
crime of De Launay struck a clear note in the crowd ; if 
after that they failed, the blow that was being struck for 
the Parliament would fail also. Thus it was that, under 
a dull grey sky, the whole of Paris, as it were, ran up 
together to the siege of the fortress. Cur^s were there 
gathering up their soiitanes and joining the multitude, 
notably the man who had once been Danton's parish 
priest, the vicar of St. Germains, with his flock at his 
heels, like the good Cure of Bazeilles in later times, or 
the humorous Bishop of Beauvais six centuries before. 
Lawyers, students, shopkeepers, merchants, the big 
brewer of the quarter, the pedants, the clerks in the 
offices, soldiers and their officers, the young nobles even — - 
there was nothing in Paris that did not catch the fever. 
The castle fell at last, because its garrison sympathised 
with the mob (of itself it was impregnable); the old 
governor made a futile attempt to blow up his strong- 
hold and his command ; some few who still obeyed him 
(probably the twenty Swiss) fired on the mob just after 
the white flag had been hoisted on the Bazini^re tower, 
and a great tide of men mad with a double treason 
swirled up the fortress. Second on the wall was a man 
with whom this book will have to deal again — H^rault 
de S^chelles, young, beautiful, and of great family, be- 
loved at the court and even pampered with special 
privilege, the friend and companion of Danton, and 
destined five years later to stand in the cart with him 
when they all went up to the scaffold together on a 
clear April evening in the best time of their youth. 

The Cordeliers were in the attack, and presumably 
Danton also, since all the world was there. But his 
only allusion to the scene is a phrase of his circular to 
the courts when he took the Ministry of Justice in 1792, 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 75 

and lie mentions his district only without including his 
own name. One anecdote, and only one, connects him 
with the days of July. It seems that in the night of the 
morrow, the early morning of the i6th, he was at the 
head of a patrol in that sudden levy of which mention 
will be made in this chapter. He thought it his duty to 
pass into the court of the Bastille, probably in order to 
gather some detached portion of his command; but he 
was met by Soules, whom the informal meeting at the 
Hotel de Ville had named governor. Full of new-fangled 
importance, Soules pompously forbad him to enter, and 
showed his commission. Danton did a characteristic 
thing, part and parcel of that intense sectionalism upon 
which he based all his action until Paris was at last in 
possession of herself: for him power was from below, and 
the armed district had a right of passage : he called the 
informal commission a rag, arrested Soulfes, and shut him 
up in the guardroom at the Cordeliers; then, with a 
rather larger force, he marched him back through the 
streets and gave him into the custody of the Hotel de 
Ville, whose authority for judgment he admitted. The 
matter would be of no importance were it not for the 
fact that, in the very natural and on the whole just 
censure which the informal municipality passed on Dan- 
ton's action, Lafayette showed an especial bitterness.^ 
It was the first clash between two men one of whom was 
to conquer and drive out the other; and it was a 
typical quarrel, for Danton stood in the matter for the 
independence of the electoral unit and for the power of 
Paris over itself: Lafayette represented the principle of 
a strong municipality based on moderate ideas and on a 
limited suffrage; in other words, the compromise which 
was planned for the very purpose of muzzling the 
capital. 

^ Chassin, Les Elections et Us Cahiers de Paris, iii. 580-581, on which 
this whole scene is based. 



76 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

I have spoken of an armed force and a patrol : it is 
in this connection that the meaning of the days of July — 
for Danton and for the Revolution — must be considered. 
They form above all a municipal reform. Those towns of 
which I have spoken as being the bond of France harked 
back suddenly to their primitive institutions, and were 
organising communal government. Paris of course was 
the leader. Even before the taking of the Bastille, the 
districts had in some cases maintained their electoral 
colleges as a permanent committee, and these electoral 
colleges met at the Hotel de Ville, forming a rough 
government for the two nights of the revolt, and finally 
directing the whole movement. Such a body was of 
necessity too large to work. But its plans were rapidly 
formed. They named a committee, which was formed of 
electors with one citizen (not an elector) added. They 
invited and obtained the aid of the permanent officers of 
what had once been the old dying and corrupt corpora- 
tion, and they thus had formed an irregular but sufficient 
organ of government for the city. It was not confirmed 
from above, nor had it, for days, any authority from the 
King, but it reposed on a force which was admitted in 
the theory of those times to be the source of power, for 
it was composed of men elected by the new suffrage. 
They had been elected for another purpose, but they were 
the only popular representatives present at all in Paris. 

Their weakness, however, lay in this quality of theirs. 
Reposing merely upon power from the districts, they 
could not act with central authority, nor had they an 
armed force of their own. They could, indeed, prevent 
the success of the rough anarchy which threatened the 
Hotel de Yille itself in the early morning of July 14, 
before the attack on the Bastille, but they could not 
prevent the lynching of those against whom the popular 
rage had arisen — De Launey, De Meray, De Persan. As 
for force, they organised a huge levy of 1200 men from 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 77 

each of the sixty districts, a force whicli, with certain 
additions, rose to 78,000. It was in this suddenly armed 
militia that Danton was elected a captain (for the moment), 
and in connection with its duties of police on the nights 
following the taking of the Bastille that his quarrel with 
Soulcs had occurred. They named Bailly their first mayor. 
They gave the command of the new national guard to 
Lafayette; on the i6th they ordered, with a pomp of 
trumpets in the Place de Gr^ve, the destruction of the 
Bastille, in which their new governor was installed. But 
through all this vigorous action there is one cardiaal fact 
to be remembered : the whole of their power was from 
below, not only in theory but in fact. We may construct 
a metaphor to express the future effect of this, and say 
that, at the very origin of the Revolution, the body of 
government in Paris was tainted by an organic weakness 
which no structural changes could remove, and to whose 
character all subsequent events for three years can be 
traced. It was essentially federal ; feeble at the centre, 
continually asking leave, morally a servant and not a 
master; lacking above all things the supreme force of 
conviction, it acted without power because it did not 
believe in itself. 

The history, then, of its struggle with the extremists 
is the history of a body attempting by compromise and 
ruse to attain a position whose theory it openly denies, 
whose moral right it will not afiirm, and whose very 
existence is made dependent upon those whom it would 
coerce against their will. The municipality tried to be a 
strong government while it openly approved of volun- 
taryism, to be powerful in its acts and weak in its 
structure. Ultimately the centre of compromise is cap- 
tured by ardent revolutionaries whom it has attempted 
to check, and then we get a true despotism in Paris — 
the terrible commune of the second period of the Republic 
and of the Terror. 



78 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

But if the character of the new municipal govern- 
ment (a character which became specially prominent after 
the legislation of the whole system later in the year) is 
the special feature of the movement, its general motive 
is of course more important. We have called it the 
Keform ; what occurred in the next few days was without 
any question the origin of the active Kevolution, and a 
little examination of facts will show that the taking of 
the Bastille was not merely a dramatic incident, still less 
the exaggerated hagarre that certain modern special pleaders 
would make it, but, on the contrary, the foundation of every- 
thing. The contemporaries are proved to have been right 
in their view of this matter, as of so many others. 

Why was this ? Because, first, in taking the Bastille, 
after having sacked the Invalides, the people of Paris 
(for it was not a particular mob, but a gathering of every 
possible class) held all the cannon in the city, and 
were thoroughly provided with small arms. They were 
suddenly become the masters of that insufficient camp 
in the Champ de Mars on which the King had relied. 
In open country and without artillery these seventy 
thousand civilians would, of course, have been so many 
sheep, but in the town and with a number of old artillery- 
men (officers and men) to work their guns, it was another 
matter. On and after July 14, 1789, Paris had found 
that possession of herself which we postulated as her first 
great appetite in the Revolution. 

Secondly, by this sudden stroke Paris forced the 
Court to capitulate. At Versailles the King went bare- 
headed to the Assembly, gave permission for the reunion 
of the three orders, for a discussion of grievances before 
supply, for the title of National Assembly, for the forma- 
tion of a constitution before the voting of fiscal measures — • 
in a word, for all that the Commons had demanded, and 
for the fulfilment of all the promises from which he had 
attempted to recede. 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 79 

Thirdly, the victory, or rather the act of Paris, changed 
and weakened the opposition. From openly gathering 
troops, and boasting an approaching attack on the Parlia- 
ment, they are reduced to intrigue and to the difficult 
business of arming in the dark. Many of the heads of 
the reaction (notably the Comte d'Artois) leave France 
in the " first emigration," and the whole action of the 
uncompromising party is made weaker, and clearly un- 
national. 

Fourthly (and perhaps this is the most important 
point), that municipal movement, of which mention has 
been made above, took its rise directly from the 14th of 
July. The towns hear of Necker's dismissal and of the 
Parisian rising by the same courier, and in a week or 
ten days the story is repeated all over France. Rouen, 
Lyons, Valence, Montpellier, Nimes, Tours, Amiens (to 
cite but a few of the more prominent examples), organise 
a new town government. Sometimes the old hereditary 
or appointed body is deposed, more often it is enlarged 
by the addition of the electoral college of the city; 
occasionally it takes upon itself the task of adding 
to itself representatives of the three orders. Again, 
the towns arm themselves as Paris did ; and finally, by 
what a contemporary called " spontaneous anarchy," the 
whole network of cities has received the pulse and vibra- 
tion of Paris; the National Guards are being drilled in 
thousands; the rusty, confused, and broken machinery 
of the ancien regime is replaced by a simple if rough 
system of local government. Moreover, since all this has 
been done by the people themselves, and without a com- 
mand or a centralised effort, since it is natural and not 
artificial, it has entered into the body of the Revolution 
and cannot be undone. 

You see, then, that the days of July gave Paris the 
first word, and made the spirit of sectionalism and local 
autonomy based upon a highly democratic theory. All 



8o THE LIFE OF DANTON 

these things are the conditions of Danton's rise; they 
make possible, and even necessary, the society of -which 
he is to be the guide. After the 1 4th of July the Cor- 
deliers meet daily ; the bell was rung above the church 
at nine in the morning, and an assembly of the district 
was held.^ It was not yet in name the famous " club "; 
but when we consider the action of the popular societies 
in Paris, we must always remember that this, even before 
it regularly assumed its final name and functions, was a 
society organised for debate and action, and that it was 
the first to be established. 

From its origin, this famous meeting is sharply marked 
in its spirit — the spirit that will later divide it not only 
from the moderate clubs, such as the Feuillants, but from 
the Jacobins themselves. In the first place, it is Parisian ; 
it attempts no provincial propaganda ; it confines itself to 
action in Paris, and even to its own immediate neighbour- 
hood. In the second place, it is purely popular. But (it 
may be asked) were not the Jacobins in their later stage 
a purely popular club ? No, not in the same sense. 
The Jacobins, as will be seen later in this book, were 
an organised body; the public was admitted to their 
galleries ; but, even in the most feverish time of the 
Revolution, they are distinguished by a close bond from 
the general people. Their membership is almost exclu- 
sively confined to the politicians, and their business is 
inquisitorial. They preach certain political dogmas, and 
make it their affair to canalise the Revolutionary current ; 
they desire to establish in France a Republican religion, 
as it were, and we shall see later in Robespierre their 
high priest and dictator. 

The Cordeliers had nothing of all this. If the 
Royalist writers begin calling them from the outset the 
" R^publique des Cordeliers," it is because they show the 
general spirit which Danton surely gave to, rather than 

^ Aulard, Revue de la Mvolution Frangaise, February 14, 1893. 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 8i 

received from, his district. Freedom of opinion, the value 
of varied discussion, open doors, and even an interming- 
ling with the street — such were their methods. The men 
who sat on the benches would vary from one hundred to 
three,^ according to the interest of the debate or the 
value of the occasion. The number inscribed on the 
registers of the society were simply the whole voting, 
strength of the district ; under the limited suffrage of 
the time it would fluctuate round the figure six hundred ; 
and hence we may observe that those who were so 
strongly touched by the contemporary movement as to 
add meeting and debating to their mere votes numbered 
a good half of the electorate. Standing grouped, or 
moving in and out of the far end of the hall, would be 
the chance-comers, the disfranchised multitude of the 
district — those even who had no residence in the quarter, 
but whom anger, interest, or curiosity might attract. It 
was composed of every kind of man — the pedantic but 
accurate Sieyes ; the fastidious radical and poet D'Eglan- 
tine ; the coarse, brutal, and atheistic Hebert ; Desmoulins, 
ardent and admirably polished, linked by his style to the 
classics of his own country and of Eome ; Legendre, the 
master-butcher, no great politician, but an honest friend ; 
and, added to all these, the lawyers. There was a pre- 
ponderance of the young men, the students and bar- 
risters in their thirtieth year; but take it all in all, 
it was the most representative, the most general of the 
meetings. 

The society, then, from which Danton rises is marked 
by these characters: it tends always to defend the pre- 
sence in politics of the whole people; it is unitarian, 
designing above all things a common ground where 
Frenchmen may found the new order in harmony ; and 
finally, it possesses nothing of the metaphysical spirit 

^ See the figures given in the petition against Danton's arrest, p. io8. 

F 



82 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

abroad at tlie time. It is all for action along tlie lines 
of common sentiments — the defence of the new individual 
Hberty, the destruction as soon as may be of whatever 
relics of the old machinery might be spared by the fear 
or inertia of certain reformers. 

I cannot leave what has already grown to an over- 
lengthy description of their political attitude without 
touching upon a quality of theirs, which was not indeed 
a principle, but which was a method of action necessarily 
flowing from the ideas they held. The Cordeliers are 
essentially " Frondeurs." They are rebellious and in 
opposition so long as the Revolution remains incomplete. 
They do things deliberately illegal, but which they justly 
consider to be in the spirit of the reform and calculated 
to aid its rapid development. Why was this ? Because 
the day after Paris had captured the position, in the very 
moment when the city had forced reaction into subter- 
ranean channels, her power was bridled. The King came 
to Paris on the 1 7 th of July and confirmed the revolu- 
tionary appointments. Bailly is mayor, and Lafayette is 
commissioned head of the National Guard. In those two 
names you have the forces, or rather the resistances, 
against which Danton and the Cordeliers made it their 
business to fight. Both of them were amiable, both 
weak, and both sincere ; but they belonged, the one to 
the high bourgeoisie, the other to the noblesse ; they 
were both full of an intense class-prejudice ; both thought 
rather of the restraints to be imposed than of the great 
change in the midst of which they lived. The little 
movements that Bailly might have mistaken for an 
enthusiasm would arise at the sight of his telescope ; the 
undoubted excitability of Lafayette was aroused by the 
public mention of his own name. Under these weak- 
nesses their external sign was pomposity, their political 
action an attempt to confine the Revolution to the middle 
class. Thus, later, the sixty districts are replaced by the 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 83 

forty-eiglit sections in order to jerrymander the Parisian 
radicals ; thus Bailly tries to oppose Parisian, appeals to 
the Parliament ; and thus Lafayette not only attempts 
to convert the National Guard into a political army, but 
makes it impossible for the poor to join it. 

Against all this the Cordeliers set their face. Such 
a partial conception of the State was the enemy of that 
ideal by which they lived and which has formed the 
Kepublic in France and the Jeffersonian democracy in 
America. Only four days after the King had worn his 
tricolour cockade, smiling on the balcony of the Hotel 
de Ville, they issue and print a resolution to use the 
armed force of their district at its own discretion ; they 
do not (of course) claim to act further, but they deter- 
mine to be themselves the police which shall conduct 
prisoners to the tribunals.-^ At the close of 1789, and 
especially in the succeeding year, we shall find them in 
the affair of Marat, of Danton's election, of the Mandat 
Imperatif, and of the Chatelet continually acting in the 
spirit of local autonomy, and refusing to admit any 
central authority save that of the whole people — bowing 
after every revolt to the Assembly, but refusing to admit 
the bourgeois power. 

The end of July was the destruction of the feudality 
in France. When the towns had fallen with a shock into 
the new conditions, the great dust of villages rose of itself 
into a storm, and there passed over all the countrysides 
that strange panic, " The Great Fear," whose legend alone 
of Kevolutionary memories remains among the peasantry 
to-day. 

The woods were full of terrors; ploughmen started 
out at night by bands to meet invisible armies ; an un- 
substantial enemy threatened the thousands of little 

^ This decree was passed by the Cordeliers on Tuesday, July 21, 1789. 
It is not so unreasonable as it might seem, for but two days afterwards 
(July 23rd) the informal municipal body recognises the necessity of new 
city elections. 



84 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

lonely villages that lie undefended on the skirts of forests 
or lost on the leagues and leagues of plains. In that 
mysterious panic the Jacquerie arose ; the cowed and the 
oppressed, who had forgotten the generous anger which 
makes men brave, rose under the lash of fear. They had 
heard of the promises of reform, they had seen the 
cahiers drawn up that they might become free men, and 
yet the town close by had risen and armed because 
something had gone wrong ; the King, whom they loved, 
was not allowed to help his people ; some one was delaying 
or destroying their hopes, and the brigands were coming 
down the road. Not with committees, organisation, and 
battalions, as the intelligence of the towns had just done, 
but instinctively and with the anarchy of the torch they 
destroyed the skeleton idol of the old regime. Like their 
fathers of four hundred years before, they were out to 
destroy the records of their servitude, and where the 
records were defended the country-houses burned. But 
this time no vengeance followed : the wild beast was dead. 
When in the noisy night of the 4th of August the privi- 
leged men scattered away their rights, then that last 
largesse of the nobles, the " Orgy," as Mirabeau called it, 
was but a gift of things already taken. After Paris, after 
the cities, the peasantry had suddenly stiffened the phrases 
by an act ; perhaps it was their formless and vague energy 
that laid the heaviest of the foundation-stones, for we 
are told that in twenty years an exile returning thought 
that France had been re-peopled with a new kind of 
men. 

It is not wonderful that, with such a fire just 
smouldering down, and with the spirit of renunciation 
abroad as well, a regular stream of emigration should set 
out. But it did not leave the opposition powerless 
though it deprived it of chiefs. If we consider the Court, 
the capital, and the Assembly in the months of August 
and September, the next great step (and the first in 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 85 

connection with which the name of Danton is directly 
connected) becomes clear. 

At Versailles all the first part of August is taken 
up in voting the famous decree which consecrated the 
debate of the 4th. The Parliament abolished feudal 
dues, declaring all rights in service at an end, and 
establishing a period for the national purchase and sub- 
sequent abolition of the rest of the feudal dues. All 
the second part of August and the whole of September 
were occupied in drawing up the declaration of the 
rights of man and in decreeing the fundamental articles 
of the new Constitution. The National Assembly, then, 
as a whole, is thoroughly the organ of France. It is not 
yet so divided as to arouse definite party feeling in the 
capital, nor to prevent on important occasions a practi- 
cally unanimous vote. But there is another factor. The 
Court (especially the Queen) has a definite party formed ; 
it has its correspondence with the emigres, and they with 
the personalities, if not with the official organs of foreign 
governments. It was without any question the object 
of this very small and very powerful group to arrest the 
Revolution, and if possible to wipe out the last six 
months. Between and above these stands the King. 
Louis (we are too apt to forget it in our knowledge of 
what follows) still possessed far more power even than the 
National Assembly ; not only by the political decrees of 
the time, but by that immeasurable force of custom, by 
the affection which he personally had inspired in the 
great bulk of men, he was a powerful king. What was 
his attitude ? He was patriotic ; he greatly sympathised 
with the ideas at the root of the reform ; he was sensible, 
and saw the practical value of casting away what is 
broken and worn out. On the other hand, he was not 
brave (especially in the face of the unknown) ; new 
developments irritated him ; he was (by the inevitable 
result of his training) determined to preserve in his own 



86 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

hands the bulk of power, and sometimes he was panic- 
stricken at a phrase or a debate which seemed to put it 
in jeopardy. Finally — a matter of the utmost impor- 
tance with a character of such well-balanced mediocrity — 
the people with whom he hunted, dined, and conversed 
were almost all of them members of a powerful, bitter, 
and skilful faction, headed by the most determined and 
able of all — his wife, for whom he had latterly developed 
a marked tenderness and even respect. 

This ring of courtiers, who were Louis's evil fates, had 
a certain quality that gave them great power in spite of 
their small numbers. It must be remembered that they 
were of the high cosmopolitan type, those who, a genera- 
tion earlier, delighted in the wit of Voltaire, who, a 
generation later, smiled at merely hearing the name 
of Talleyrand. Perhaps there was never a body better 
fitted to influence an isolated man by phrases, continual 
conversation, and intrigue. 

What is the effect ? That the King, always honestly 
intending the reform, always hesitates a little too long, 
with doubts that are often intellectual in origin and 
sometimes wise in their nature, but foolish at the moment. 
He hesitates to sign the decree of the 4th of August ; ^ 
he hesitates about this and that expression in the De- 
claration of rights. He has a very strong reluctance to 
forego the absolute veto ; all through September you can 
hear the machinery creaking, and it gets worse as the 
autumn advances. 

Meanwhile in Paris two forces are at work to aid 
this crisis at Versailles. First, the popular societies, 
notably that meeting in the Palais Koyal, which now 
is almost a Parliament, where every prominent Parisian 
name is heard, and whence those curious documents, 
parodies of the old-fashioned decrees, emanate,^ not 

^ Signed 21st September; promulgated 3rd November. 

^ An excellent example is on p. 45 of Danton, Homme d'Etat, 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 87 

unfrequently with tlie power to cause insurrection. 
Secondly, the price of food, especially of flour, is rising 
rapidly. We have explained in the first chapter how 
largely the lack of food in the towns was due to vicious 
interference with exchange : when such is the prime 
cause of economic trouble, the least disturbance aggra- 
vates it to a high degree ; thus it was that while the 
harvest was being gathered in the north, and in the south 
had been already stored, the supply of cereals in the 
capital was all but exhausted. 

Thus curiously side by side (and partly overlapping) 
the intense political interest of the voting class and the 
growing misery of the populace ran fatally towards the 
days of October. At the Cordeliers, innocent of pedants, 
practical, alert, debating with open doors, there met the 
two revolutionary interests, those of the politicians and 
of the poor; and this is why they are heard so loudly 
in September, and why Danton and his district become 
famous just before the march on Versailles. 

It will be remembered that the assembly of electors 
at the Hotel de Ville had guided Paris through the great 
storm of July 13—17; their powers were vague and un- 
constitutional, for they had been elected at first merely to 
choose Deputies for Paris, nevertheless it was they who 
had made Bailly mayor, who had nominated Lafayette, 
who had formed the National Guard, and who had been 
confirmed by the King in their functions of a provisional 
municipality. It was acting on this decree which gave 
them a right to take political initiative, that on Thursday, 
July 23, they had sent a circular to the sixty districts 
asking each to name two members. The hundred and 
twenty so elected were to draw up a plan for a new 
municipality ; they met, did so, and the result of their 
labours was the issue on August 30th of a scheme for a 
new municipal system, upon which the primaries in every 
districts were asked to debate. Somewhat illogically, 



88 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

however, the complicated document was accompanied by 
a writ demanding the immediate election in each district 
of five members to form the new corporation. In other 
words, the primaries were asked to form a new muni- 
cipality, to give it full powers, and then to debate 
academically upon what they had done. 

It may have been only a blunder, but the Cordehers 
took alarm at what certainly seemed to be a plot on the 
part of the Moderates. The project and the writ had 
reached them on Sunday August 3 oth ; by Thursday, Sep- 
tember 3rd, they had arrived at a decision to refuse the 
writ. They argued that it was absurd to ask the districts 
to debate on a project after its most essential part had been 
realised, namely, the election of deputies. On that elec- 
tion, its methods, the powers of the members, and so forth, 
the greater part of the discussions would turn, and by 
the time the districts had arrived at such and such con- 
clusions, or had modified the powers of their deputies 
in such and such a fashion, those deputies would already 
have been sitting for some time as a municipal council, 
would be helping to frame or to modify the new muni- 
cipal system on their own account. It would have been 
not only confusion but an encroachment on the principle 
by which (nominally) the districts had been consulted, 
viz., that the electors themselves in their districts should 
thrash out the new system. The Cordeliers named com- 
missioners who examined the whole matter, and, on 
Saturday, the 1 2th, definitely rejected the writ. Never- 
theless, as the other districts had all obeyed and had 
elected their five members each, the Cordeliers elected 
their five under protest^ on the following Monday, the 
14th, and sent them, bound by a strict oath, to the Hotel 
de Ville. 

"^ Their names were Peyrilhe, De Blois, De Granville, Dupr^, Crohar^. 
They can be found, with all the decrees touching this business, in Danton, 
Homme d'Etat (Robinet, 1889), p. 248. Printed, like all the Cordeliers' 
decrees, by Momoro ia the Rue de la Harpe, and signed, "d'Anton," 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 89 

This little incident merits a very considerable degree 
of attention, although it has been somewhat neglected by 
the historians, and even by Danton's biographers. It was 
the first skirmish in that decisive struggle between the 
democratic idea, headed by the Cordeliers, and the hmited 
suffrage of the first municipality — a struggle which is at 
the root of all the action of Paris. It is the first act 
of Danton in an official position; in much that the 
Cordeliers had done he was evidently the leader, but in 
this document we learn that he is elected president of 
the district, and see his name signed.^ And finally, 
there appears here, for the first time in the Kevolution, 
the Mandat Impm^atif, the brutal and decisive weapon of 
the democrats, the binding by an oath of all delegates, 
the mechanical responsibility against which Burke had 
pleaded at Bristol, which the American constitution 
vainly attempted to exclude in its principal election, and 
which must in the near future be the method of our 
final reforms. It had been raised, and Danton had raised 
it; for these five deputies, before being permitted to 
attend at the Hotel de Ville, swore to a definite plan 
of action whose terms were dictated at the general meet- 
ing of the district. 

The struggle as it continues becomes of greater im- 
portance, until, within four months, it faces Danton 
himself in the Hotel de Ville ; but we cannot describe 
its further steps until we have mentioned the next action 
with which the Cordeliers are associated, and in which 
their decisive role is largely determined by the Revolu- 
tionary championship which this brush with authority 
had given them. 

We have described above the various forces that were 

^ It may be remembered that Bougeart (p. 69) claims the presidency 
for Danton at the very beginning of '89. The error of this has been 
pointed out. On the other hand, Aulard says he was not President till 
October. This is another error. There is at least one earlier document, 
that of September, quoted on the preceding page. 



90 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

fatally converging to form the whirlpool of October — the 
hesitancy of the King, the desperate intrigues of the Court, 
the intense political excitement of the Palais Royal and of 
the electors in Paris, the growing misery of the populace. 
We have pointed out how the Cordeliers, with their popular 
audience and popular sympathies, were at once the only 
great debating place in Paris and the only spot where the 
forces of voters and non-voters could join hands. Add 
to this the effect of the protest described above and of 
the position such a struggle gave them in the democratic 
movement, and their importance in the days of October 
becomes evident. 

It was at the close of September that all these ten- 
dencies came together. Again, after three months of 
silence, the reaction found its voice, and the King's un- 
certainty, the Court faction's plotting, culminated in the 
arrival at Versailles of military reinforcements. The body- 
guards were doubled, and there marched in the Regiment 
of Flanders— a body (by the way) to whose name clings 
something of comedy, and whose raggedness has passed 
into a marching legend. This book is not the place to 
describe at any length what followed, save in its connec- 
tion with Danton and the Club. On Thursday, October 
the ist, a famous dinner was given by the body-guard 
to the newly arrived regiment. The Court dealt with 
excellent material, and with the wine and the night the 
admirable feelings of loyalty arose : the poor King assumed 
the halo of a leader to these men whose regimental tradi- 
tions were knit up with the monarchy; soldiers, they 
appreciated his defeat, and, being comrades, they were 
angry at his loneliness. They greeted him with a passion- 
ate song, destroyed the three-coloured cockades, and pinned 
on the white ribbons ; for the first time in a year enthu- 
siasm was with the beleaguered, though it lasted but a 
few hours and stretched to but a few hundred of men. 
To Paris, hearing of it on the next day, Friday, it was a 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 91 

challenge, discussed, oddly enough, with some contradic- 
tions and confusions. Men talked of Bouill^, the courtier, 
and his frontier command at Metz; people were afraid 
that he would protect the King in some flight to the 
provinces; there ran a vague uneasiness and a fear of 
anarchy with the King's disappearance ; above all, in the 
minds of the politicians a fear of armed reaction, and in 
the minds of the starving a terror that the reforms which 
were so material to them were in jeopardy. Still, all 
Saturday the waters only moved at the surface, and you 
might have thought that Paris was incapable of any 
combined action. 

But if the reaction contained a powerful integrating 
force in the Court party, Paris also possessed it in a small 
meeting and in one supremely energetic man. On the 
morning of Sunday, a day when there was leisure to read, 
the walls were placarded with the manifesto of the Cor- 
deliers. It demanded an insurrection, and was signed 
with Danton's name. On Monday morning they rang the 
tocsin at the belfry of the convent, and the battalion of 
the district was drawn up and armed. De Crevecoeur, their 
commander, prevented them marching in a body, but a 
number of the district determined to merge with the 
crowd. Meanwhile, the mob gathered from every quarter, 
especially the Place de Greve — a true mob this time, and 
accompanied, as all the world knows, by a crowd of women, 
poured up the Versailles road. They made a hideous 
night in the great space before the palace. Lafayette 
followed tardily with his organised volunteers, the National 
Guard; but on the Tuesday the palace was forced, and 
some of its defenders killed. The royal family came in 
their heavy coach down the twelve miles of falling road 
into Paris, and, not without some state, they entered the 
Tuilleries. The National Assembly followed the King 
into the capital. 

Thus the second milestone of the Revolution was 



92 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

passed. Of all tlie revolutionary days, these were the 
most purely anarcliic. The action was that of men hardly 
possessing ideas, but fixed upon a practical thing — the 
presence of the King in Paris. It had for its main 
object good, and for its method mad anger. Neverthe- 
less, the instinct of the mob had hit the mark. Like all 
sudden actions, it had made issues definite which had 
till then been confused. It put an end once and for all 
to the idea of crushing the reform at its outset by force ; 
it gave Paris a mastery over every subsequent action ; of 
the many ways the Court party might have tried it 
reduced them to one only, namely, an organised secret 
diplomacy with the object of raising Europe against 
France. 

As for Louis, we may honestly believe that his capture 
was not entirely distasteful to him : as he was less acute, 
so he had certainly more common-sense than his wife. If 
he was jealous of his dignity, which had been grievously 
offended, yet he was very French, patriotic, and not un- 
willing to see himself the object of a violent demand. 
Everybody saw — the King must have seen it too — that 
the whole uprising was monarchic. There was not any 
class more monarchic in France than the poor. The King 
as their father was an idea bred in them for centuries, and 
he knew that they made of him a kind of providence who 
could give them food ; that they rose not to make him less 
powerful, but to make a faction impotent. And there was 
nothing distasteful to him in being a King of the French, 
seated in the midst of his great capital, and on the summit, 
as it were, of a new order. October did not threaten to 
make him less, but more of a King. It was later, in 
questions that affected the heart, especially in matters 
of religion, that the gulf opened between Louis and his 
people. 

With the King, then, at the Tuilleries, with the 
Assembly some three hundreds yards off down the gardens 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 93 

in the riding-school of the palace/ we enter the long 
avenue by which Paris obtains the initiative in every 
subsequent reform. Let us turn, then, to follow once 
more the action of the society and the man who, 
between them, determine the direction of Paris for the 
next three years. 

The quarrel which was sketched earlier in this chapter, 
the assault of the district upon the Moderates, continued 
throughout the autumn and winter. Pour times running 
Danton is elected President,^ and it is under his guidance 
that the affair proceeds. While the Assembly are making 
a new France at the Manege, organising the departments,^ 
fixing the restricted suffrage,* creating the communes 
over all France,^ the Cordeliers are making the spirit of 
a new Paris on the hill over the river ; this spirit will 
conquer and transform the debaters in the Parliament. 

On the 22nd of October they follow up their previous 
action. Already before the revolt they had come into 
collision with the municipality: in this new resolution they 
protest against a demand of Lafayette for regular courts- 
martial in the National Guard. The protest had a 
meaning, for Lafayette was raising an armed bourgeois 
power, but the motive of the Cordeliers was mainly the 
desire to harass the Moderates. A week later the Muni- 
cipal Council gave its reply to these various encroach- 
ments on the part of the Cordeliers in a decree of the 
29th of October : it condemned the action of the district 
in three definite points : first, its habit of passing resolutions 
like a small municipal body ; secondly, its habit of asking 
the fifty-nine other districts to pass spontaneous resolu- 
tions on important matters ; thirdly (and most important), 

^ They had sat for a while at the Ev^ch^, on the Island of the Cite, 
while the Manage was being prepared. 
^ Rev. de Paris, xxiii. p. 20. 

* November nth and 12th. 

* 22nd of December. 

^ 1 2th November and 14th of December. 



94 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

its revolutionary action in demanding an oatli from its 
delegates. In this last point tlie purely democratic idea 
on the one hand, and the senatorial theories of the 
Moderates on the other, came face to face, and on that 
point the issue turned. On the 2nd of November the 
district replied by a resolution, denying the right of the 
elected to control the electors, and especially condemning 
the interference of the Hotel de Ville with debates in 
the districts. On the 12th, ten days later, they came 
out into the open with a resolution that was like a 
declaration of war against Bailly and Lafayette; they 
drew up a form of oath which their five deputies were to 
swear, and this oath bound the members of the district 
not only to obey the district in all its resolutions, but also 
to admit that they could be dismissed after being called 
upon three times to resign by a majority of the district. 
It was the full doctrine of delegacy and of the corporate 
wUl. 

Only two of the five members took the oath, the 
rest resigned and were promptly replaced by others, 
and these presented themselves at the Hotel de Ville 
on November i6th. Condorcet was President of the 
municipal body, and practically everybody there was 
furious against the Cordeliers. They demanded a 
recital of the causes which had led to the dismissal 
of the three members, and then they insisted on hearing 
the terms of the famous oath that bound the five 
deputies. Of the two who had consented to take the 
oath in the first instance, one (Peyrilhe) muttered excuses, 
but the other (Crohare), who seems to have been more of 
a true Cordelier, was very proud of the position he held, 
and would have explained the true doctrine at great 
length, had not the meeting cut him short by a vigorous 
vote, declaring all such oaths inadmissible, sending away 
the three new members, and recalling those who had 
resigned. On the next day the municipality broke the 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 95 

law. It turned Croliare out, but bj a very small vote, in 
which many abstained.^ Of course such an action was 
not to be tolerated, for it would have made the majority 
of the municipality able to end all opposition or debate, 
and the mistake of Condorcet was Danton's opportunity. 

Every character he possesses is apparent in the struggle 
that follows. He carries it on with something of the 
diplomacy that later was matched against all Europe : he 
secures his allies and isolates his enemies : he pleads to 
convince and to obtain official support, not (as do so many 
of his contemporaries) in order to follow a line of thought. 
In a word, he is habile, and practically he succeeds. 

Observe the quality of this action. When the 
district meets on the 17th (while the Commune was 
dismissing Crohare), Danton sees the importance of keeping 
its debate in bounds. That gathering, which is so ena- 
moured of abstract rights, is suddenly bound down by the 
superior ability of its chairman : the discussion is made 
to follow points of legal technicality, and Danton imposes 
upon the Cordeliers so strict a discipline for one day, that 
two points alone emerge from the speeches, and they are 
precisely the two which could be used as arguments, (i.) 
That the Commune was provisional, and its raison d'etre 
was the formation of a new municipal system : in such 
cases (say the Cordeliers) the subjects of the experiment 
must remain masters, and it would be absurd to take away 
the power of control, that later would have to be readmitted 
when the new municipal constitution should be sent to 
the districts for acceptance or rejection : in a word, they 
argued on the vice de raisonnement — the want of logic 
— in the Commune's action. (2.) They appealed to 
the Assembly — that is, they recognised and submitted to 
the centre of national power.^ The Assembly was in 
a dilemma. It was in full sympathy with the Moderates 

^ 31 against 20 (Aulard, from Journal de la Cour et de la VUle, p. 518). 
* Danton, Homme d'&at, pp. 256, &c. Signed, " d' Anton." 



96 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

with Bailly and with Lafayette ; on the other hand, it 
could not, without a great loss of prestige, deny the 
very principles upon which its own power rested. Their 
committee on the subject desired a complete admission of 
the Cordeliers' claim ; the Assembly rejected this, and tried 
to compromise by saying that both parties should go back 
to " the state of things of November i oth " — that is, to the 
state of things before the oath and before the whole 
trouble. The compromise would not hold. The deputies 
thus legally reinstated all resigned (except Crohare) on 
account of the feeling in their district, and the Cordeliers 
then, with full legality, re-elected their popular champions 
of the Mandat Imjperatif. 

The Commune took its defeat ill. They tried to prove 
that the old members had not really resigned. They sent 
a committee to interview them, but the committee came 
back with proof that the resignation was voluntary, and 
finally, on November 28, the little company of democrats 
were sworn in to a very ungracious and unwilling Assem- 
bly, and Danton had won. 

My readers must excuse so detailed an account of an 
event which is empty of picturesque detail and which 
is so small a part of that fertile winter. From the point 
of view of general history it is the first appearance of 
the Mandat Imperatif in action ; and from the point of 
view of Danton's role in the Kevolution it is of the 
utmost importance, though it is so insignificant a cata- 
logue of quarrels. It was Danton's first victory, and it 
was decisive. It put a wedge, as it were, into the gate 
that he was forcing open by persistent effort; and though 
his final position in the administration of Paris is won 
after many further failures, it is a direct consequence of 
this success in 1789. At the same time it showed that 
a young, loud-voiced lawyer of the middle class could 
have that one necessary quality of skill lying under the 
coarse exterior ; he could play the game with the subtlety 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 97 

of appreciation "which was so necessary in the terrible 
year of invasion, the keen aptitude of the mind which 
the visionaries were too unpractised, the demagogues too 
brutal to attain. That aptitude had appeared in Danton's 
pleading, and was to make him during the war a man 
necessary to France. 

It was a month or six weeks after these events, on 
some date in January which we can only fix by indirect 
evidence, that Danton was himself elected to represent 
the district. The restless society had caused a further 
resignation, and five new members came to the Hotel 
de VUle.-^ He came unimportant, effaced, known merely 
as a demagogue, into that municipal assembly which 
contained the most dignified, the most learned, and the 
most representative of the noblesse and higher bour- 
geoisie, to sit under the frowns and endure the silence, 
and at first the contempt, of Condorcet, of D'Espagnac, 
of the academicians Laharpe and Suard, the astronomer 
De Cassini, Lavoisier, De Moreton-Chabrillant captain 
of the guard, Bailly and Lafayette themselves. And in 
the very first hours of his presence, before he had taken 
the oath, an incident occurred which clinched, as it were, 
the disfavour in which he was regarded, and which for a 
year put him in the background of a council which he 
was destined ultimately to master. I refer to what is 
known as the incident of Marat. 

Marat was more of a gentleman than Danton ; it is 
also fair to say that he was nearly mad. No two men 
could have been more different than the learned, hritable, 
visionary physician and the young, healthy country law- 
yer who was for a moment his champion. The one has 
met continually the ruling class, and has suffered from 

^ Danton, his friend Legendre, Testulat, Sable^, and Guintin. Several 
authorities have placed Danton's election in September 1789 instead of 
January 1790, an error due (probably) to following Godard's list, which 
was pubhshed in 1790, but bore the title, "Members of the Commune 
elected since September 1789." 

G 



98 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

its insoleiice and privilege; the other has known pro- 
fessional friends indeed of the first rank, but has passed 
his Hfe with the trading middle class, and has entered 
perhaps during all his career in Paris not one salon, nor 
met perhaps one of the brilliant women of his time. 

Marat presented from the outset the first problem to 
be faced by a people who are testing liberty. He was a 
journalist and pamphleteer of unbridled license, one of 
those who cannot find in themselves that control which, 
when it is absent in public writers, can only be sup- 
planted by the cumbersome, dangerous, and necessary 
machinery of the Censor. Not for money, of course, nor 
for any unworthy motive, but for the excellent end of 
attaining freedom, this morbid mind poured out the 
wildest, the most sensational, and the most dangerous 
appeals. 

Now the courts were in process of transition ; rapidly 
as the reform had marched since the summer, much of 
the old judicial procedure necessarily remained, and 
among the rest a body known as the Chatelet, whose 
removal was already planned, but which had to be main- 
tained until the new system could be put in working 
order. It was very typical of the old regime. A body 
of privileged lawyers, many of them young and ignorant, 
holding their places by inheritance or purchase, and 
charged with what we may call the police of the capital. 
They had formerly possessed (and it had not yet been 
abolished in detail) the power of arbitrary arrest. They 
drew their name from the heavy fortress which had once 
defended the Pont au Change when Paris was confined 
to the island of the Cite ; some of its walls dated at 
latest from the Norman siege of the tenth century, and 
beneath it were cellars which had for centuries been the 
prisons of those arrested in Paris by the city guard. It 
stood gloomy and strong on the site of the modern place 
that bears its name, dominating the close streets of the 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 99 

Boucherie, and possessing in its associations and its 
waning power all the qualities tliat liad made the Bastille 
odious to the people. It may be imagined how the juris- 
diction which it contained was bound to attract the chief 
efforts of the reformers ; it could not, however, cease to 
exercise its functions until there was some more liberal 
institution to supply its place, and it came of necessity 
into violent collision with that spirit which was deter- 
mined to break down by force what the resolutions of 
the Assembly had abolished in theory, but had not yet 
supplanted in fact. 

The principal object of Marat's tirades was the 
moderate town council, and especially Bailly. Moreover, 
the worthy astronomer was an admirable butt. He 
assumed a livery, and put a fine coat-of-arms on his 
carriage, and, while he weakly opposed the rising de- 
mocracy of Paris, he was very strong in the matter of 
pomposity. Marat was called to the bar of the Com- 
mune to answer for these attacks upon the mayor on the 
28th of September. A warrant for his arrest was made 
out by the Chatelet on the 6th of October, but the day 
was too critical for an action of police against an 
individual. On the 8th another warrant was sent out, 
and Marat fled to a hiding-place up on Montmartre, from 
which, like a mad prophet on a hill-top, he pamphleteered 
the city at his feet. His quarrels, therefore (though very 
different in kind) were contemporaneous with the im- 
portant struggle between the Cordeliers and the Munici- 
pality which are detailed above. The two attacks began 
to merge in December. 

Marat, on the 12 th of that month, was hunted out of 
his retreat, and brought before a lower court, but so con- 
fused were the powers of the Chatelet in this period of its 
reform and extinction that the prosecution was dropped. 
Emboldened by this failure on the part of his opponents, 
he came to live and print his sheet openly in the Rue des 



E*^a 



ICO THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Fosses St. Germains — that is, in tlie midst of the district 
of the Cordeliers. What followed is well known. At a 
moment when the struggle between the district and the 
Hotel de Ville is at its height, just after the scene in 
which Danton's deputation had protested against the 
mayor's commission to the militia officers, while the 
insulting irony of the term " my lord " was still ringing 
in Bailly's ears, and when Danton himself had been 
actually elected for the district, and was present in the 
Municipality on the point of taking the oath — when all 
these causes of quarrel were, so to speak, met in one 
date, the Moderates determined to strike. Marat was 
pouring out his impossible diatribes from the territory of 
the rebellious district, and no opportunity could be more 
favourable. The Chatelet issued once more the warrant 
for his arrest, and this time it was supported by Lafayette, 
who promised to lend four thousand of the National 
Guard. 

Now note the importance of what follows. Neither 
side in the struggle of the autumn had definitely won. 
The National Assembly had temporised, the advantage of 
the Cordeliers in the matter of the disputed elections had 
been achieved by a trick, and in the dead-lock between 
two principles, the central power of the Municipality and 
the local autonomy of the district, neither of the two 
theories was based upon tradition, neither even (in the 
confusion of rapid reforms) could justify itself by a defi- 
nite pronouncement of the law. On the one side was the 
theory of a highly restricted suffrage, government by a 
class socially refined and lying with the nobility rather 
than with the people ; this side was determined to form 
an army to support their politics, and it was they who, 
when they did act at last, achieved — but much too late — ■ 
the sharp and sanguinary reaction of July 1791. On the 
other side was the desire for a wide, later for a universal, 
suffrage; a determination to emphasise in the develop- 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS loi 

ment of the Revolutionary theory, equality and the general 
will, rather than order and the practical working of new 
laws ; a political attitude which was to lead the Revolu- 
tion into the intense idealism of 1792, and to end by 
declaring the Republic. And all this was represented in 
the demand which, of its nature, is the expression of ex- 
treme democracy — I mean the demand for local autonomy, 
the idea that an act of government is most just when 
it emanates not even from representatives, but from the 
lips of the governed themselves. 

Such were the two forces opposed to one another ia 
the affair of Marat— forces which, if not in all France, were 
in Paris at least the two great camps of the Revolution. 
Already the district had declared its intention to protect 
the liberty of the press within its boundaries,-^ and had 
been wise enough to specially condemn Marat's violence ; 
already had it named a committee of five to see that no 
arbitrary arrest should take place in its territory,^ when 
Lafayette sent his militia, cavalry and infantry, on the 
2 2nd of January to help the arrest of Marat. Not content 
with the 3000 men thus employed, he clinched the 
matter with cannon, placing a couple of pieces at the 
end of the Rue des Fosses St. Germains.^ He was deter- 
mined to settle things by force, and beat the extremists 
with their own weapons. His effort did not find force 
opposed to it, as he had hoped ; it broke itself in the 
most unexpected manner upon the legal ability of 
Danton. 

The district might have raised, all told, 1500 men, 
and it possessed two pieces of artillery; but Danton 
was far too wise to use them in such a cause as 
that of defending Marat. A street fight, and one in 

^ Marat's presses were hidden in a cellar of the Cordeliers now situated 
under the house of the concierge of the Clinique. 

^ January igth, 

^ The Rue des Fosses was (and is, under its new name) remarkably 
straight for an old street. Cannon could be used. 



I02 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

whicli the Cordeliers would have been infallibly beaten, 
would have ruined the future chances of their politics. 
He armed no one, and did not add a single man to 
the small guard which each district kept permanently 
drilled, but he assigned them as their guard-room for the 
week the ground-floor of Marat's house. Then he went 
there himself with his four companions on the newly 
elected committee, and awaited developments. 

The great body of the National Guard were massed 
in their blue and white at the end of the street, their two 
pieces sweeping it, and there was opposed to them nothing 
but a small crowd and few arguments. Through their 
ranks, and accompanied by a small detachment, came the 
two officers or policemen of the Chatelet.^ They pre- 
sented their writ, and Plainville, the commander of the 
little detachment that accompanied them, asked to be 
allowed to place sentries at the door. The commissioners 
gave them leave with the greatest pleasure in the world, 
but when the officers presented their warrant, the oppor- 
tunity which Danton had been waiting for with some 
anxiety presented itself. With a slovenliness that was 
part and parcel of the old regime, the Chatelet had not 
made out a new warrant, but had issued the old one 
which had done duty on the 8 th of October. 

Now, since that date the Assembly had passed several 
important changes in the criminal law, notably one in the 
same month October which declared that "no warrant 
for arrest can be issued against a householder save in 
case of those charges which, if proved, would lead to 
imprisonment."^ A very obvious principle; but in 
France of the old regime to seize a man, hold him, and 
even to let him go without trial, merely for some purpose 
of the pohce, was permitted, and the Chatelet may have 

^ Their names were Ozanne and Damien ; the same Damien, I believe, 
who committed the blunder of September 13, 1791. See p, 150, 
^ Article 9 of the decree of October 8 and 9, 1790. 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 103 

acted upon this tradition. Add to this the fact that the 
Assembly had created elective councils in each district to 
watch the interest of every inhabitant arrested in criminal 
cases/ and it is easily apparent that the Chatelet had 
committed a great blunder, the value of which a man 
trained in the courts and quick to seize an error in 
procedure immediately recognised. 

Danton affirmed that the writ was illegal, offered 
to prove it, and led the officers of the Chatelet to the 
hall of the district. There he had the new procedure 
read to them, compared it with the date of their war- 
rant, and so confused the minds of those simple men that 
they signed a procis-verbal which declared that, after 
hearing such reasons, they doubted how they should act. 
They came back escorted by Fabre d'Eglantine through 
an angry crowd, and were received by the officers of the 
National Guard with some heat. They stood firm, how- 
ever, and refused to pursue the arrest until they could 
consult with those who sent them, and finally the diffi- 
culty was removed by Danton's promising to appeal to 
the National Assembly and to abide by its decision. The 
terms were accepted, the sentries left Marat's door, and 
the troops withdrew. 

All this debate and turmoil had taken up the morn- 
ing and the luncheon-hour, the Rue des Fosses St. 
Germains was evacuated in the early afternoon, and by 
four o'clock of that day, 22nd of January 1790, Danton 
and his companions were pleading their cause at the bar 
of the House. It was the old pohcy of resorting to the 
National Assembly as the last place of appeal, and of 
using this principal result of the Revolutionary move- 
ment as a weapon against the Parisian Moderates. The 
Assembly found itself in the old dilemma, and adopted 

^ "Notables-adjoints," to the number of seven in each district. Danton 
himself was elected on to such a body in May or June 1790, and served for 
a fev7 months. 



104 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

the old compromise. By its theory it was democratic ; all 
its phrases and many of its decrees were based on the 
" Contrat Social," but by its personnel and its connections 
it was natm^ally aUied to the high professional class, to 
the Baillys and the Lafayettes. It instructed Target 
(the President of the fortnight) to write to the district; 
he condemned the attitude of the Cordeliers, but Parlia- 
ment " relied upon their patriotism to execute the will of 
the Assembly." The district, true to its policy, at once 
submitted. They sent Legendre and Testulat to tell the 
commander of the forces (who had re-entered the Rue 
des Fosses) that they had no longer the right to prevent 
the arrest ; whereupon he sent in the police and awaited 
Marat in the street below. The house was empty, and 
Marat was on his way to England, a country with which 
he was not unfamiliar, and the vices of whose constitution 
had aheady furnished a theme for his too facile pen. 

Such are the details of the story of the famous Friday 
in the district of the Cordeliers, events which put Danton's 
name into some prominence, but which also showed him 
to the most educated of his time, and therefore to pos- 
terity, in something of a false light. He appears as the 
friend of Marat, a man for whom he felt no sympathy, 
to whom he was immeasurably superior, and whom he 
had supported only because Marat's quarrel was a tactical 
opportunity against the Moderates. To have been from 
the outset admitted by the cultured would have been 
difficult to him — it would have needed tact, self-effacement, 
and silence. For he showed by nature just those rough 
gestures and loud, ill-chosen phrases which should be the 
sign of a foolish and dangerous man; of what underlay 
it, of his learning, his patriotism, and his common-sense 
he was to give plenty of proof; but so violent were the 
prejudices he had raised that only great length of time 
has effaced the false impression of his first appearance 
on the scene of politics. We can see the statesman 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 105 

clearly, but his contemporaries never quite pierced the 
medium that had gathered round him ; here and there a 
just and noble man, as was Condorcet, would admit his 
own misconception, but to the bulk of the gentlemen in 
power he was and remained the demagogue. 

Two years of careful action fail to clear him, because, 
being already one of those whose superficial qualities 
repel the close attention necessary to a just opinion, he 
had also the misfortune to enter the arena from the 
wrong door. Those who were most with him adored 
him, the great bulk of his district-voters signed a fervent 
declaration in his favour, and later his immediate friends 
are willing to die with him. But the class with which 
at heart he had most in common held aloof; he had 
succeeded twice in a pitched battle with them; they 
apologise for his acquaintance, vilify him in their letters, 
and if his name has emerged from all this error, if he 
has been given his statue in a time of social order and 
reconstruction, it is because this man, who never wrote, 
who left only a confused legend of his personality, saved 
his country when it was at war with the whole world, 
and such actions compel history to inquiry and resti- 
tution. 

On the 23 rd, the day after the trouble, he was sworn 
in to the reluctant Commune, and there follow two long 
years ^ of patient attempt to gain the place for which he 
feels himself fitted, but years (on the whole) of disappoint- 
ment, and in which his real position in Paris (I mean the 
prominence he held in the thoughts of men) contrasts 
curiously with the little part he played. 

1790 contains so great a portion of the Revolution, 
and sows the seed of so much future division and civil 
war, that it seems ridiculous to confine oneself to the 

^ That is, till his election as substitute to the Procureur in December 
1791. 



io6 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

description of tlie restricted action of one man who had 
not yet even attained power. It will be necessary, how- 
ever, to make a survey of this restricted action in order 
that we may comprehend the greater role of Danton in 
the two years that follow. 

Danton came, then, with Legendre and the three others 
into a city Council very much opposed to him and to the 
district whose spirit he had formed. He was not often 
heard, and there is no doubt that he deliberately tried to 
purchase by silence the more just and equable judgment 
of such men as he respected, but who knew him only by 
unfavourable report. For the bulk of the Assembly he 
cannot but have felt contempt; they had no instinct of 
the revolutionary tide ; even when they were attempting 
to check the movement that Danton represented, they 
were inefficient and unworthy opponents, from whom his 
eye must have wandered inwards to the great battles that 
were preparing. 

In the eight months during which he was a member 
of the Provisional Commune, that is, from January to 
September 1790, his name appears in the debates but 
a dozen times.^ More than half of these are mention of 
committees upon which his common-sense and legal train- 
ing were of service; in one only, that of February 4, 
does he speak on a motion, and that is in support of 
Barre to &.dmit the public when the oath was taken : one 
other (that on the 19th of March concerning the forma- 
tion of a " grand jury") would be interesting were it not 
that the whole gist of the debate was but a repetition of 
the much more significant discussion at the Cordeliers. 
Finally, there is one little notice which is half-pathetic 
and half-grotesque : he is one of the committee of twenty- 
four charged with the duty of " presenting their humble 
thanks, with the mayor at their head," to the Bang for 

^ January 25, 28; February 4, 16; March 3, 5, 13, 19; June 15, 19, 23. 
Aulard, Eev. Fran false, February 14, 1893, pp. 142, 143. 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 107 

giving tlie municipality a marble bust of himself. But 
every entry is petty and unimportant : Danton at the 
Provisional Municipality of 1790 is deliberately silent — 
he can do nothing. 

If we turn, however, to a field in which he was more 
at home, we find him during that year more than ever 
the leader of the Cordeliers, which itself becomes more 
than ever the leader of Paris. 

There are two important features in the part he 
plays at the assemblies of the district during the spring 
and summer in which he was a silent member of the 
Commune. First, the affair of his arrest ; secondly, his 
campaign against what may be called " the municipal 
reaction." 

As to the first, it is a very minor point in the general 
history of the Revolution, but it is of considerable in- 
fluence upon the career of Danton himself. When the 
affair of Marat was (or should have been) forgotten, the 
Chatelet, with that negligence which we have seen them 
display in the business of the warrant for Marat's arrest, 
saw fit to launch another warrant, this time for the 
arrest of Danton himself. Once more that unpopular 
and moribund tribunal put itseK on the wrong side of 
the law, and once more it chose the most inopportune 
moment for its action. It was on the 17th of March,^ 
nearly two months after the affair — two months during 
which Danton had been hard at work effacing its effects 
upon his reputation — that the warrant was issued, and the 
motive of arrest given in the parchment was of the least 
justifiable kind. In the district meeting of the day, 
when the police officers had been taken to the hall of 
the Cordeliers, and had had the changes in the law read 
out to them, Danton had made use of a violent phrase : 

^ It is this warrant which has probably misled one biographer as to the 
date of the "Affaire Marat." {Danton, Homme d'Mat, p. 67: "En mars 
eurvint I'affaire Marat.") 



io8 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

its actual words were not known ; some said tliat he 
had threatened to " call out the Faubourg St. Antoine, 
and make the jaws of the guard grow white." Other 
witnesses refused to attribute those words to him, but 
accused him of saying, " If every one thought as I do, 
we should have twenty thousand men at our back;" his 
friends admitted that some angry and injudicious speech, 
such as he was often guilty of, had escaped him, but 
they affirmed that he had added, " God forbid that such 
a thing should happen ; the cause is too good to be so 
jeopardised." 

Whatever he said (and probably he himself could 
not accurately have remembered), the place and the time 
were privileged. It was a test case, but the logic of such 
a privilege was evident. Here you have deliberative 
assemblies to which are intrusted ultimately the forma- 
tion of a government for Paris : what is said in such a 
constituent meeting, however ill-advised, must in the 
nature of things be allowed to pass ; if not, you limit the 
discussion of the primary, and if you limit that discussion 
you vitiate the whole theory upon which the new con- 
stitution was being framed. It must be carefully remem- 
bered that we are not dealing with deliberative bodies 
long established, possessed of the central power, and hold- 
ing privilege by tradition and by their importance in the 
State ; we are dealing with the elementary deliberative 
assemblies in a period which, rightly or wrongly, was 
transforming the whole State upon one perfectly definite 
political theory — namely, that these primary assemblies 
were the only root and just source of power. When, 
therefore, Parisian opinion rose violently in favour of the 
president of a district so attacked, when three hundred 
voters out of five signed a petition in Danton's favour, 
when he was re-elected president of the district twelve 
days after the issue of the warrant, it was because the 
whole body of the electors felt a great and justifiable fear 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 109 

of what was left of tlie old regime. The Chatelet had 
acted so, not from a careful appreciation of public danger 
— to fend off which temporary powers had been given 
it — but because it was blind with old age; because it 
dated from a time and was composed of a set of men 
who hated all deliberative assemblies, and it was justly- 
thought that if such actions were justified, the whole 
system of revolutionary Paris was in danger. 

As though in proof of the false view that the Chatelet 
took of their man, on the 19 th of March, two days after 
the warrant was issued, Danton was urging the replace- 
ment of the Chatelet by a Grand Jury ; he had an 
admiration and a knowledge of the old English system, 
and it was against a man attempting so wise a reform 
that the last relic of the old jurisprudence was making 
an attack. 

An appeal was lodged with the National Assembly, 
and Anthoine read a long report to the Assembly upon 
May 1 8. This report was strongly in favour of Danton. 
It was drawn up by a special committee — not partisan in 
any way — and after examining all the evidence it came 
to this conclusion against the Chatelet. Nevertheless 
the House, a great body of nearly a thousand men, to 
most of whom the name of Danton meant only a loud 
Radical voice, hesitated. To adopt the report might have 
irretrievably weakened the Chatelet, and the National 
Assembly was extremely nervous on the subject of order 
in Paris. It ended by an adjournment. The report 
remained in Danton's favour ; he was not arrested, but 
the affair was unfortunate for him, and threw him back 
later at a very important occasion, when he might have 
entered into power peaceably himself and at a peace- 
able time. 

But while this business was drawing to its close, 
during the very months of April and May which saw his 
partial vindication, another and a far more momentous 



no THE LIFE OF DANTON 

business was occupying the Cordeliers — a matter in which 
they directed all their energy towards a legal solution, 
but in which, unfortunately for the city, they failed. 

Ever since the days of October — earlier if you will — 
there had been arising a strong sentiment, to which I 
have alluded more than once, and which, for lack of a 
better name, may be called the Moderate reaction in 
Paris. It is difficult to characterise this complex body 
of thought in one adjective, and I cannot lengthen a 
chapter already too prolonged by a detailed examination 
of its origin and development. Suffice it to say that 
from the higher bourgeoisie (generally speaking), from 
those who were in theory almost Republican, but whose 
lives were passed in the artificial surroundings of wealth, 
and finally from the important group of the financiers, 
who of all men most desired practical reform, and who 
of all men most hated ideals; from these three, sup- 
ported by many a small shopkeeper or bureaucrat, came 
a demand, growing in vigour, for a conservative muni- 
cipal establishment — one that should be limited in its 
basis, almost aristocratic in quality, and concerned very 
much with the maintenance of law and order and very 
little with the idea of municipal self-government. 

It is a character to be noted in the French people, 
this timidity "^f the small proprietor and his reliance 
upon constituted authority. It is a matter rarely ob- 
served, and yet explaining all Parisian history, that this 
sentiment does not mark off a particular body of men, 
but, curiously enough, is found in the mind of nearly 
every Frenchman, existing side by side with another set 
of feelings which, on occasion, can make them the most 
arrant idealists in the world. 

For the moment this intense desire for order was 
uppermost in the minds of those few who were permitted 
to vote. In the Cordeliers it was the other character of 
the Parisian that was emphasised and developed. They 



D ANTON AT THE CORDELIERS iii 

were determined on democracy, like everybody else ; but, 
unlike the rest, they were not afraid of the dangerous 
road. They were inspired and led by a man whose one 
great fault was a passionate contempt of danger. On 
this account, though they are taxpayers and bourgeois, 
lawyers, physicians, men of letters and the like, they do 
all they can to prevent the new municipal system from 
coming into play, but they fail. 

Now, consider the Assembly. That great body was 
justly afraid of Paris; indeed, the man who was head 
and shoulders above them all — Mirabeau — was for leaving 
Paris altogether. The Assembly, again, had the whole 
task of re-making France in its hands, and it could not 
but will that Paris, in the midst of which it sat, should be 
muzzled. Through all the debates of the Provisional 
Commune it could easily be seen that Bailly and Lafayette 
were winning, and that the Parliament would be even 
more Moderate than they. Three points were the centres 
of the battle : first, the restricted suffrage which was to 
be established ; ^ secondly, the power which was to be ex- 
ercised over the new Commune by the authorities of the 
Department ; thirdly, the suppression of those sixty 
democratic clubs, the districts, and their replacement by 
forty-eight sections, so framed as specially to break up 
the ties of neighbourhood and association, which the first 
of the Kevolution had developed. It was aimed especi- 
ally at the Cordeliers. 

Against the first point the Cordeliers had little to 
say. Oddly enough, the idea of universal suffrage, which 
is so intimate a part of our ideas on the Revolution, was 
hardly thought of in early 1790. Against the second 
they debated, but did not decree ; it was upon the third 
that they took most vigorous action. The law which 

^ That is, of course, the inclusion of Paris into the general scheme of 
December 1789 — a scheme that enfranchised the peasants, but created an 
oligarchy in the towns. See above, pp. 21, 22, and 93. 



112 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

authorised tlie new municipal scheme was passed on May 
the 27 th, and, faithful to their policy, the Cordeliers did 
not attempt to quarrel with the National Assembly, but 
they fought bitterly against the application of the law 
by Bailly and his party. The law was signed by the 
King on June the 27th, and on the same day the mayor 
placarded the walls, ordering an immediate installation 
of the new system. The 27 th was a Saturday. Within 
a week the new sections were to be organised, and on 
the Monday, July 5, the voting was to begin. The very 
next day, the 28 th, the Cordeliers protested in a vigorous 
decree, in which they called on the fifty-nine other 
districts to petition the National Assembly to make a 
special exception of the town of Paris, to consider the 
great federation of July 14, which should be allowed 
to pass before the elections, and finally to give the city 
time to discuss so important a change. All through the 
week, on the ist, 2nd, and 3rd of July, they published 
vigorous appeals. They were partially successful, but in 
their main object — the reconstruction of the aristocratic 
scheme and the arousing of public spirit against it — they 
entirely failed. Bailly is elected mayor on August 2 by 
an enormous majority — practically 90 per cent. The 
old districts disappear, and, like every other, the famous 
Cordeliers are merged in the larger section of the Theatre 
Fran^ais. It may not sit in permanence; it may not 
(save on a special demand of fifty citizens) meet at all ; it 
is merely an electoral unit, and in future some 14,000 
men out of a city of nearly a million are to govern all. 
The local club, directing its armed force and appealing to 
its fellows, is abolished. Danton then has failed. 

But, as we shall see later, the exception became the 
rule. No mechanical device could check the Revolution. 
The demand for permanent sections is continuous and 
successful. From these divisions, intended to be mere 
marks upon a map, come the cannon of the loth of 



DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 113 

August, and it is tlie section of the Theatre Fran^ais, 
wherein the traditions and the very name of the Cor- 
dehers were to have been forgotten, that first in Europe 
declared and exercised the right of the whole people to 
govern. 

If I may repeat a common-place that I have used 
continually in this book, the tide of the Revolution in 
Paris was dammed up with a high barrier ; its rise could 
not be checked, and it was certain to escape at last with 
the force and destructive energy of a flood. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 

I HAVE taken as a turning-point in tlie career of Danton 
the municipal change which marks the summer of 1790, 
conckiding with that event the first chapter of his poli- 
tical action, and making it the beginning of a new phase. 
Let me explain the reasons that have led me to make 
such a division at a moment that is marked by no 
striking passage of arms, of policy, or of debate. 

In the first place, a recital of Danton's life must of 
necessity follow the fortunes of the capital. The spirit 
of the people whose tribune he was (their growing 
enthusiasms and later their angers) — that spirit is the 
chief thing to guide us in the interpretation of his 
politics, but the mechanical transformations of the city 
government form the framework, as it were, upon which 
the stuff of Parisian feeling is woven. The detail is 
dry and often neglected; the mere passing of a parti- 
cular law giving Paris a particular constitution, a system 
not unexpected, and apparently well suited to the first 
year of the Kevolution, may seem an event of but 
little moment in the development of the reform; but 
certain aspects of the period lend that detail a very 
considerable importance. In the rapid transformation 
which was remoulding French society, the law, however 
new, possessed a strength which, at this hour, we can 
appreciate only with difficulty. In a settled and tradi- 
tional society custom is of such overwhelming weight 
that a law can act only in accordance with it ; a sudden 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 115 

ctange in tlie macliinery of government would break 
down of itself — nay, in such a society laws can hardly be 
passed save those that the development of tradition 
demands. But in a time of revolution this postulate 
of social history fails. When a whole people starts out to 
make fresh conditions for itself, every decree becomes an 
origin; the forces that in more regular periods mould 
and control legislative action are, in a time of feverish 
reconstruction, increased in power and give an impetus 
to new institutions ; the energy of society, which in years 
of content and order controls by an unseen pressure, is 
used in years of revolution to launch, openly and 
mechanically, the fabric that a new theory has designed. 
Thus you may observe how in the framing of the 
American constitution every point in a particular debate 
became of vast moment to the United States ; thus in our 
time the German Empire has found its strength in a set 
of arbitrary decrees, all the creation of a decade ; thus in 
the Middle Ages the Hildebrandine reform framed in the 
life of one man institutions which are vigorous after the 
lapse of eight hundred years; and thus in the French 
Revolution a municipal organisation, new, theoretic, and 
mechanical, was strong enough, not indeed to survive so 
terrible a storm, but to give to the whole movement a 
permanent change of direction. 

This, then, is the transitional character of the summer 
of 1790, as regards the particular life of Danton and the 
particular city of Paris. What the Cordeliers had fought 
so hard to obtain as a constitutional reform had failed. 
The direct action of the districts upon the municipality 
was apparently lost for ever, and the centre of the new 
system was in future to be controlled in the expression 
of ideas and paralysed in its action. What the Cordeliers 
had represented in spirit, though they had not for- 
mulated it in decrees — government by the whole people 
— ^was apparently equally lost. The law of December 



ii6 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

(that wliicli established the " active and passive citi- 
zens") was working for Paris as for all France; and 
though, a suffrage which admitted two- thirds of the male 
population to the polls could not be called restrictive, yet 
the exception of men working for wages under their 
master's roof, the necessity of a year's residence, and the 
qualification of tax-paying did produce a very narrow 
oligarchy in a town like Paris : the artisans were excluded, 
and thousands of those governed fell just beyond the 
limits which defined the municipal voter. Danton may 
receive the provincial delegates, may make his speeches 
at the feast in the Bois de Boulogne ; but once the organ 
of government has been closed to his ideas, the road 
towards the democracy lies through illegality and revolt. 

Now there is another and a wider importance in this 
anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. It is the point at 
which we can best halt and survey the beginning of the 
heat which turned the Revolution from a domestic reform 
of the French nation to a fire capable of changing the 
nature of all our civilisation. I do not mean that you 
will find those quarrels in the moment; in 1790 there is 
nothing of the spirit that overturned the monarchy nor 
of the visions that inspired the Gironde; you cannot even 
fairly say that there are general threats or mutterings of 
war, although the Assembly saw fit to disclaim them : it is 
a year before the fear of such dangers arises. But there is 
in this summer something to be discovered, namely, an 
explanation of why two periods differing so profoundly in 
character meet so suddenly and with such sharp contrast 
at one point in the history of the movement ; it is from 
the summer of 1790 and onwards that the laws are 
passed, the divisions initiated, which finally alienate the 
King, from that lead to his treason, from that rouse 
Europe, and from the consequent invasion produce the 
Terror, the armies, and the Empire. The muid needs 
a link between two such different things as reform and 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 117 

violence, and because tliat link is not supplied ia the 
mere declaration of war or in the mere flight to Varennes, 
men commit the error of reading the spirit of the Eepub- 
lic into the days of Mirabeau, or even of seeing temperate 
politics in the apostolic frenzy of '93. Some, more igno- 
rant or less gifted than the general reader, explain it by 
postulating in the character of the French nation quaint 
aberrations which may be proper to the individual, but 
which never have nor can exist in any community of 
human beings. 

Let me recapitulate and define the problem which, as 
it seems to me, can be solved by making a pivot of the' 
anniversary of the States-General. 

There are, then, in the story of the Kevolution these 
two phases, so distinct that their recognition is the foun- 
dation of all just views upon the period. In the first, the 
leaders of the nation are bent upon practical reforms ; the 
monarchy is a machine to hand for their accomplishment ; 
the sketch of a new France is drawn, the outlines even 
begin to be filled by trained and masterly hands. Phrases 
will be found abundantly in those thirty months, because 
phrases are the christening of ideas, and no nation of 
Roman training could attempt any work without clear 
definitions to guide it. But these phrases, though often 
abstract in the extreme, are never violent, and the oratory 
itself of the National Assembly is rarely found to pass the 
limits which separate the art of persuasion from the mere 
practice of defiance. 

In the second phase, for which the name of the Con- 
vention often stands, those subterranean fires which the 
crust of tradition and the stratified rock of society had 
formerly repressed break out in irresistible eruption. 
The creative work of the revolutionary idea realises itself 
in a casting of molten metal rather than in a forging, 
and the mould it uses is designed upon a conception of 
statuary rather than of architecture. The majestic idol 



ii8 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

of the Republic, in whose worship the nation has since 
discovered all its glories and all its misfortunes, is set up 
by those artists of the ideal ; but they forget, or perhaps 
ignore, the terrible penalties that attach to superhuman 
attempts, the reactions of an exclusive idealism. 

What made the second out of the first ? What made 
a France which had discussed Sieyfes listen to St. Just or 
even to Hebert ? The answer to this question is to be 
discovered in noting the fatal seeds that were sown in 
this summer of 1790, and which in two years bore the 
fruit of civil war and invasion. 

In the first place, that summer creates, as we have 
seen, a discontented Paris — a capital whose vast majority 
it refuses to train in the art of self-government, and 
whose general voice it refuses to hear. 

In the second place, it is the moment when the dis- 
content in the army comes to a head. The open threat 
of military reaction on the side of a number of the 
officers, their intense animosity against the decrees abo- 
lishing titles, their growing disgust at the privileges 
accorded to the private soldiers — all these come face to 
face with non-commissioned officers and privates who are 
full of the new liberties. These lower ranks contained 
the ambitious men whose abihty, the honest and loyal 
men whose earnestness, were to carry French arms to the 
successes of the Revolutionary wars. 

In the third place, it is the consummation of the 
blunder that attempted to create an established National 
Church in France. Before this last misfortune a hundred 
other details of these months that were so many mothers 
of discord become insignificant. Civil war first mutter- 
ing in the South, counter-revolution drilling in Savoy, the 
clerical petition of Nimes, the question of the Alsatian 
estates, the Parisian journals postulating extreme demo- 
cracy, the Jacobins appearing as an organised and propa- 
gandist body, the prophetic cry of Lameth — all these 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 119 

things were but incidents that would have been forgotten 
but for the major cause of tumult, which is to be dis- 
covered in the civil constitution of the clergy. 

Of course, the kings would have attacked, but they 
were divided, and had not even a common motive. Of 
course, also, freedom, in whatever form it came, would 
have worked in the moribund body of Europe like a 
drug, and till its effect was produced would have been 
thought a poison. But against the hatred of every 
oppressor would have been opposed a disciplined and a 
united people, sober by instinct, traditionally slow in the 
formation of judgments, traditionally tenacious of an 
opinion when once it had been acquired. It would 
have been sufficient glory for the French people to have 
broken the insolence of the aggressors, to have had upon 
their lists the names of Marceau and of Hoche. 

But with the false step that produced civil war, that 
made of the ardent and liberal West a sudden opponent, 
that in its final effect raised Lyons and alienated half the 
southern towns, that lost Toulon, that put the extreme 
of fanaticism in the wisest and most loyal minds — such a 
generous and easy war was doomed, and the Revolution 
was destined to a more tragic and to a nobler history. 
God, who permitted this proud folly to proceed from a 
pedantic aristocracy, foresaw things necessary to man- 
kind. In the despair of the philosophers there will arise 
on either side of a great battle the enthusiasms which, 
from whencever they blow, are the fresh winds of the soul. 
Here are coming the heroes and the epic songs for which 
humanity was sick, and the scenes of one generation of 
men shall give us in Europe our creeds for centuries. 
You shall hear the " Chant du Depart " like a great hymn 
in the army of the Sambre et Mouse, and the cheers of 
men going down on the Vengeur ; the voice of a young 
man calling the grenadiers at Lodi and Areola ; the noise 
of the guard swinging up the frozen hill at Austerlitz. 



I20 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Already tlie forests below tlie Pyrenees are full of tlie 
Spanish guerillas, and after how many hundred years 
the love of the tribe has reappeared again above the con- 
ventions that covered it. There are the three colours 
standing against the trees in the North and the South; 
and the delicate womanly face of Nelson is looking over 
the bulwarks of the Victory, with the slow white clouds 
and the light wind of an October day above him, and 
before him the enemy's sails in the sunlight and the black 
rocks of the coast. 

It may be well, at the expense of some digression, to 
say why the laws affecting the clergy should be treated as 
being of paramount historical importance. They ruined 
the position of the King; they put before a very large 
portion of the nation not one, but two ideals ; and what 
regular formation can grow round two dissimilar nuclei ? 
Finally — a thing that we can now see clearly, though then 
the wisest failed to grasp it — they went against the grain 
of the nation. 

It is a common accusation that the Eevolution com- 
mitted the capital sin of being unhistorical. Taine's 
work is a long anathema pronounced against men who 
dared to deny the dogmas of evolution before those 
dogmas were formulated. Such a criticism is erroneous 
and vain ; in the mouths of many it is hypocritical. The 
great bulk of what the Eevolution did was set directly 
with the current of time. For example : The re-unison 
of Gaul had been coming of itself for a thousand years — 
the Eevolution achieved it; the peasant was virtually 
master of his land — it made him so in law and fact; 
Europe had been trained for centuries in the Eoman law 
— it was precisely the Eoman law that triumphed in the 
great reform, and most of its results, all of its phraseology, 
is drawn from the civil code. But in this one feature of 
the constitution of the clergy it sinned against the nature 
of France. Of necessity the Parliament was formed of 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 121 

educated men, steeped in the philosopliy of the time, and 
of necessity it worked under the eyes of a great city 
population. In other words, the statesmen who bungled in 
this matter and the artisans who formed their immediate 
surroundings were drawn from the two classes which had 
most suffered from the faults of the hierarchy in France. 

Mirabeau, for example, has passed his life in the 
rank where rich abb^s made excellent blasphemy; the 
artisan of Paris has passed his life unprotected and 
unsolicited by the priests, whose chief duty is the main- 
tenance of human dignity in the poor. Add to this the 
Jansenist legend of which Camus was so forcible a relic, 
and the Anglo-mania which drew the best intellects into 
the worst experiments, and the curious project is inevi- 
table. 

In these first essays of European democracy there 
was, as all the world knows, a passion for election. In 
vain had Kousseau pointed out the fundamental fallacy 
of representation in any scheme of self-government. The 
example of America was before them ; the vicious temp- 
tation of the obvious misled them ; and until the hard 
lessons of the war had taught them the truth, represen- 
tation for its own sake, like a kind of game, seems to 
have been an obsession of the upper class in France. 
They admitted it into the organisation of the Church. 

Now let us look in its detail at this attempt to make 
of the Catholic Church in the eighteenth century a 
mixture of the administration of Constantino, of the 
presbyteries of first centuries, and of the "branch of the 
civil service" which has suited so well a civilisation so 
different from that of France. 

The great feature of this reform was the attempt to 
subject the whole clerical organisation to the State. I 
do not mean, of course, the establishment of dogmas by 
civil discussion, nor the interference with internal dis- 
cipline; but the hierarchy was to be elected, from the 



122 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

parish priest to the bishop; the new dioceses were to 
correspond to the new Departments, and, most important 
of all, their confirmation was not to be demanded from 
the Pope, but " letters of communion " were to be sent to 
the Head of the Church, giving him notice of the election. 

This scheme passed the House on July 1 2, 1 790, two 
days before the great feast of the federation. A time 
whose intellect was alien to the Church, a class whose 
habits were un- Catholic, had attempted a reformation. 
Why was the attempt a blunder ? Simply because it 
was unnecessary. There were certain ideas upon which 
the reconstruction of France was proceeding ; they have 
been constantly alluded to in this book ; they are what 
the French call " the principles of '89." Did they neces- 
sarily affect the Church ? Yes ; but logically carried out 
they would have affected the Church in a purely negative 
way. It was an obvious part of the new era to deny 
the imperium in imperio. The Revoliition would have 
stultified itself had it left untouched the disabilities of 
Protestants and of Jews, had it continued to support 
the internal discipline of the Church by the civil power. 
It was logical when it said to the religious orders : " You 
are private societies; we will not compel your members 
to remain, neither will we compel them to leave their 
convents." (In the decree of February 13, 1790.) It 
would have been logical had it said to the Church : " It 
may be that you are the life of society ; it may be that 
your effect is evil; we leave you free to prove your 
quality, for freedom of action and competition is our 
cardinal principle." But instead of leaving the Church 
free they amused themselves by building up a fantastic 
and mechanical structure, and then foimd that they were 
compelling religion to enter a prison. Nothing could be 
conceived more useless or more dangerous. 

On the other hand, if this scheme as a whole was 
futile, there were some details that were necessary results 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 123 

of what the clergy themselves had done, and some which, 
if not strictly necessary, have at least survived the Kevolu- 
tion, and are vigorous institutions to-day. It might have 
been possible for Rome to seize on these as a basis of 
compromise, and it is conceivable, though hardly pro- 
bable, that the final scheme might have left the Church 
a neutral in the coming wars. But if the councils of the 
Holy See were ill-advised, the Parliament was still less 
judicious; its extreme sensitiveness to interference from 
abroad was coupled with the extreme pedantry of a 
Lanjuinais, and the scheme in its entirety was forced 
upon Louis. He, almost the only pious man in a court 
which had so neglected religion as to hate the people, 
wrote in despair to the Pope ; but before the answer 
came he had signed the law, and in that moment signed 
the warrant for his own death and that of thousands of 
other loyal and patriotic men. 

While these future divisions were preparing, during 
the rest of the year 1790 Danton's position becomes more 
marked. We find a little less about him in the official 
records, for the simple reason that he has ceased to be a 
member of an official body, or rather (since the first Com- 
mune was not actually dissolved till September) he remains 
the less noticeable from the fact that the policy which 
he represented has been defeated ; but his personality is 
making more impression upon Paris and upon his enemies. 
We shall find him using for the first time moderation, and 
for the first time meeting with systematic calumny. He 
acquires, though he is not yet of any especial prominence, 
the mark of future success, for he is beginning to be singled 
out as a special object of attack; and throughout the sum- 
mer and autumn he practises more and more that habit 
of steering his course which up to the day of his death so 
marks him from the extremists. 

The failure of his policy, the check which had been 
given to the Cordeliers, and the uselessness of their pro- 



124 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

tests on tlie ist, 2nd, and 3rd of July, had a marked effect 
upon the position of Danton even in his own district. He 
had been president when they were issued, and his friend 
D'Eglantine had been secretary. One may say that the 
poHcy of resistance was Danton's, and that but for his 
leadership it would have been unheard. Hence, when it 
has notoriously failed, that great mass of men who (when 
there is no party system) follow the event, lost their faith 
in him. 

Bailly is not only elected by an enormous majority 
in all Paris ^ on the 2nd of August, but even Danton's own 
district, now become the Section of the Theatre Frangais, 
abandoned his policy for the moment. In a poll of 5 80, 
478 votes were given for Bailly. 

In this moment of reverse he might with great ease 
have thrown himself upon all the forces that were for the 
moment irregular. The Federation of July had brought 
to Paris a crowd of deputies from the Departments, and to 
these provincials the good-humour and the comradeship 
of this Champenois had something attractive about it. In 
a Paris which bewildered them they found in him some- 
thing that they could understand. In a meeting held by 
a section of them in the Bois de Boulogne it is Danton 
who is the leading figure. When the deputies of Marseilles 
ask for Chenier's " Charles IX.," it is Danton who gets it 
played f jr them at the Theatre Frangais in spite of the 
opposition of the Court; and again it is Danton who is 
singled out during an entr'acte for personal attack by the 
loyalists, who had come to hiss the play.^ 

The unrepresented still followed him, and he still 
inspired a vague fear in the minds of men like Lafayette. 
Innocent of any violence, he stood (to those who saw him 
from a great distance) for insurrection. He was remembered 

^ He received 12,550 votes, the great bulk of the limited suffrage. 
Forty-nine odd votes were cast for Danton, but he was obviously not a 
candidate (Aulard). 

^ Ami du Pev^le, No. 192. 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 125 

as the defender of Marat, and Marat in turn annoyed him 
by repeated mention and praise in his ridiculous journal. 
Note also that the time was one in which the two camps 
were separating, though slowly, and the role of a dema- 
gogue would have been as tempting to a foolish man on 
the Radical, as the role of true knight was to so many 
foolish men on the Conservative side. Each part was 
easy to play, and each was futile. 

Danton refused such a temptation. He, almost alone 
at that moment (with the exception, in a much higher 
sphere, of Mirabeau), was capable of being taught by 
defeat. He desired a solid foundation for action. Here 
were certain existing things : the club of the Cordeliers, 
which had for a while failed him ; the Friends of the Con- 
stitution, which were a growing power; the limited suffrage 
of Paris, which he regretted, but which was the only 
legal force he could appeal to ; the new municipal con- 
stitution, which he had bitterly opposed, but which was 
an accomplished fact. Now it is to all these realities that 
he turns his mind. He will re-capture his place in the 
Section, and make of the quarter of the Odeon a new 
R^publique des Cordeliers. He will re-establish his posi- 
tion with Paris.' He wUl attempt to enter, and perhaps 
later to control, this new municipality. It was for such 
an attitude that St. Just reproached him so bitterly in the 
act of accusation of April 1794, while at the moment he 
was adopting that attitude he was the mark of the most 
violent diatribe from the Conservatives. Nothing defines 
Danton at this moment so clearly as the fact that he 
alone of the popular party knew how to be practical and 
to make enemies. 

The month of August may be taken as the time when 
Danton had to be most careful if he desired to preserve 
his place and to avoid a fall into violence and unreason. 
It was the 2nd of that month (as we have said) that 
saw Bailly's election, the 5th that gave Danton a personal 



126 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

shock, for on that date he received, for an office which 
he really coveted and for which he was a candidate, but 
193 votes out of over 3000 present. 

From that moment he devotes all his energy to recon- 
struction. The first evidence of his new attitude appears 
with the early days of September. Already the old meet- 
ing of the Cordeliers had been changed into the club, and 
already his influence was gaining ground again in the 
debates and in the local battalion of the National Guard, 
when the news of Nancy came to Paris. 

A conflict between the National Guard and the people, 
an example of that with which Lafayette continually 
menaced Paris — the conflict of the armed bourgeoisie and 
the artisans, or rather of the militia used as a professional 
army against the people — this had happened at last. It 
was an occasion for raving. Marat raved loudly, and the 
royalists gave vent to not a little complacent raving on 
their side. In the great question whether the army was 
to be democratic or not, whether reaction was to possess 
its old disciplined arm, it would seem that reaction had 
won, and France had seen a little rehearsal of what in ten 
months was to produce the 1 7th of July. 

In such conditions the attitude of the Cordeliers was 
of real importance. During all Lafayette's attempt to 
centralise the militia of Paris this battalion had remained 
independent ; its attitude during the days of October, its 
defence of Marat in January, had proved this. The crisis 
appeared to demand from this revolutionary body a strong 
protest against the use of the militia as an army to be 
aimed against the people. Such a protest might have been 
the cause of an outbreak in Paris. Under these circum- 
stances Danton — by what arguments we cannot tell (for 
the whole affair is only known to us by a few lines of 
Desmoulins) — obtained from his battalion a carefully- 
worded pronouncement. " For all the high opinion we 
have of the National Guards who took part in the affair 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 127 

of Nancy, we can express no other sentiment than regret 
for what has happened."^ It was moderate to the degree 
of the common-place, but it saved Danton from the abyss 
and from the street. 

There followed another check in which he showed 
once more his power of self-control. The " Notables " — 
corresponding something to the aldermen of our new 
municipal scheme in England — were to be elected for 
Paris a little after the elections for the mayor and for the 
governor of the Commune. Each Section was to elect 
three, and Danton had so far regained his influence at 
home as to be elected for the Theatre Franpais. 

Unfortunately the new constitution of Paris had been 
provided with one of those checks whose main object it 
is to interfere with direct representation. The choice of 
each Section was submitted to the censure or the approval 
of all the others. It is by the judgment which they 
pass that we can best judge the suspicion in which he 
was held by the great bulk of his equals. A regular 
campaign was led against him. The affair of Marat was 
dragged up, especially the warrant for Danton's arrest 
which the Ch^telet had issued six months before. That 
very favourite device in electioneering, the doubt as to 
real candidature, was used. The voter, not over-well 
informed in a detail of law (especially at a time when all 
law was being re-modelled), was told that the warrant 
made Danton's candidature illegal. They said he was 
sold to Orleans, because he had haunted the Palais 
Royal and because he hated Lafayette. The character 
of demagogue — the one thing he desired to avoid — was 
pinned to his coat, and alone of all the Notables he was 
rejected by forty-three Sections (five only voting for him) 
in the week between the 9th and the i6th of September.^ 

^ Revolutions de France et Brabant, torn. x. p. 171. 

^ There is a misprint (a very rare thing with this careful historian) in 
footnote No. 3, p. 231, of M. Aulard's article on Danton in the Rev. Fran- 



128 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

In these five were the Postes, Invalides, Luxembourg. 
It was not the purely popular quarters that supported 
Danton, but rather the University and the lawyers. 

He took his defeat as a signal for still greater reserve, 
letting his name take perspective, and refusing by any 
act or phrase to obscure his reputation with new issues. 
The tactics succeeded. When, in October, a public orator 
was needed, they remembered him, and he presents the 
deputation of the i oth of November. The circumstances 
were as follows : — 

The ministry which surrounded the King was frankly 
reactionary. I do not mean that it was opposed to the 
constitution of the moment. Perhaps the majority (and 
the less important) of its members would have been loath 
to bring back anything approaching the old regime. But 
there were in the Kevolution not only the facts but the 
tendencies, and in a period when every day brought its 
change, the tendencies were watched with an extreme 
care. France may have thought, seeing the federation 
on the Champ de Mars and the altar where Talleyrand 
had said mass, that the Eevolution was at an end and 
the new state of affairs established in peace, but those 
in the capital knew better ; and the men immediately 
surrounding the King, who saw the necessary consequences 
of his signing the civic constitution, and the growing 
breach between himself and the assembly — these men 
were on the King's side. The affair at Nancy, which had 
aroused so many passions, was the thing which finally 
roused Parisian opinion ; and at the very moment when 
the King is secretly planning the flight to Montm^dy — 
that flight which six months later failed — Paris is for 
the first time claiming to govern the councils of the 
kingdom, 

t^aise for March 14, 1893. For " November " we should read " September," 
for we know that the voting was over on September 16. See Kobiquet, 
Personnel Municipal, p. 373, and the evidence on all sides that a new poll 
was ordered on September 17 in his Section. 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 129 

It was the Sections tliat began tlie movement, those 
Sections whose action was to have been so restricted, and 
which, upon the contrary, were becoming the permanent 
organs of expression in the capital. 

The Section Mauconseil on the 22nd of October sent 
in a petition for the dismissal of the cabinet and appealed 
to the National Assembly. The Section of the National 
Library followed suit three days later, and sent its petition 
not only to the Assembly but to the King. It must be 
remembered that the legend of a good king deceived by 
his advisers held at the time. Indeed, it survived the 
flight to Varennes ; it partly survived the i oth of August, 
and only the research of recent times has proved clearly 
the continual intrigue of which the King was the head. 

On the 27th Mauconseil came forward again with a 
petition to the mayor, Bailly, to call the general council 
of the Commune and consider the complaints. Fourteen 
other Sections backed this petition. Bailly hesitated, and 
while he temporised, all the forty-eight Sections named 
commissioners and sent them to an informal gathering 
at the Archbishopric.^ 

Danton was a member of this big committee and was 
made secretary. He drew up an address ; the mayor was 
twice summoned to call the general council of the Com- 
mune. Hesitating and afraid, Bailly finally did so, and 
after a violent debate the resolution passed. Bailly was 
sent by the town to " present the Commune at the bar 
of the Assembly and demand the recall " of the Ministers 
of Justice, War, and the Interior — De Cice, La Tour du 
Pin, and St. Priest. 

Danton was taken out of the informal body to which 
he had acted as secretary, and asked to be the orator 

^ This big building in the island next Notre Dame disappeared in the 
restorations of Viollet le Due. It was often used in the revolutionary 
period for public meetings, and even the Assembly sat there for a few 
days after entering Paris in October, and while the Riding-School was 
being prepared for it. 

I 



I30 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

of the legal Commune. There followed on the loth of 
November a very curious scene. 

Bailly pitifully apologising with his eyes brought in 
the representative body of Paris. It was present for the 
first time in the National Parliament, and before three 
years were over Paris was to be the mistress of the Parlia- 
ment. At present they were out of place ; their demand 
frightened them. It needed Danton's voice to reassure 
them and to bring the opposing forces to a battle. 

His voice, big, rough, and deep, perhaps with a 
slight provincial accent, helped to strengthen the false 
idea that the gentlemen of the Parliament had formed. 
This Danton, of whom they heard so much, had appeared 
suddenly out of his right place — for he had no official 
position — and the Right was furious. 

Yet Danton's harangue was moderate and sensible. 
There is, indeed, one passage on the position of Paris 
in France which is interesting because it is original, but 
the bulk of the speech is a string of plain arguments. 
This passage is as follows : — 

" That Commune, composed of citizens who belong in a 
fashion to the eighty -three Departments — {The Bight, No ! 
no !) — jealously desiring to fulfil in the name of all good 
citizens the duties of a sentinel to the constitution, is 
in haste to express a demand which is dear to all the 
enemies of tyranny — a demand which would be heard 
from all the Sections of the Empire, could they be. 
united with the same promptitude as the Sections of 
Paris." ^ 

For the rest, he is continually insisting upon the right 
of the Parliament to govern — the right, above all, of a 
representative body to dismiss a ministry. He had in 
this, as in certain other matters, a very English point of 
view, and certainly the arguments he used were able. 
But he was interrupted continually, and we get, even in 

■ Moniteur, Old Series, No. 316 (1790). 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 131 

tlie dry account of the Moniteur, a good picture of wliat 
tlie scene must have been Hke — 

" A dismissal which the Assembly has the right to 
demand." 

The Abbe Maury : " Who ever said that ? " [Murmurs 
and discussion followed. The Abbe was called to order, 
when . . .] 

M. Cazales remarked : " It is our duty to listen, even 
if they talk nonsense." 

Danton besfan again with : " The Commune of Paris 
is better able to judge the conduct of ministers than . . ." 

The Abb^ Maury : " Why ? " [He is agam called to 
order.] 

And so it went on. But in a duel of this kind lungs 
are the weapons, and Danton had the best lungs in the 
hall. He had also perhaps the soundest brain of any; 
but the Abbe Maury and his friends had chosen more 
rapid methods than those of arguments. The short 
address ended (it did not take a quarter of an hour to 
read), and the deputation left the Assembly. This last 
debated and refused the decree ; yet the Commune had 
succeeded, for in a few days the Archbishop of Bordeaux 
left the Ministry of Justice, and La Tour du Pin, " who 
thought that parchment alone made nobility " (a phrase 
of Danton's which had upset the Right), left the Ministry 
of War. 

The deputation had petitioned On Wednesday, the 
I oth of November. Four days later he was elected head 
of the militia battalion in which he had served for a 
year.^ There is some doubt as to whether he remained 
long at this post. Some antagonists talk vaguely of hia 
"leading his batallion" in '92, but never as eye-witnesses. 

^ M. Aulard says "somewhere between the loth and the 15th," and 
"nous n'avons pas la date precise." He has probably overlooked L'Ami du 
Peuple, No. 290, " Le 14 de ce mois Danton a ^t^ nomm^ h, la place du Sieur 
Villette." 



132 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

On the otlier hand, there is a letter in existence talking 
of Danton's resignation ; but it is unsigned and undated. 
Only some one has written in pencil, "Gouvion, 22 nd 
November." ^ 

At any rate, the interest of the little incident lies in 
the fact that it meant a meeting between Danton and 
Lafayette, and, as Freron remarks in his journal, " Cela 
serait curieux." ^ Perhaps they did not meet. 

The campaign continually directed against Danton 
was as active in this matter as in all others. It gives 
one, for instance, an insight into the management and dis- 
cipline of the guards to learn that " Coutra, a corporal, 
went about asking for signatures against Danton's nomi- 
nation." ^ He had just risen above the successes of his 
enemies. November had put him on a sure footing again, 
and in January he reached the place he had had so long 
in view, the administration of Paris. 

It will be remembered that the voting was by two 
degrees. The electors nominated an " electoral college," 
who elected the Commune and its officers. Already in 
October Danton had been put into the electoral college 
by twenty-six members chosen by his Section, but not 
without violent opposition. Finally, after eight ballots, 
on the 31st of January 1791, he became a member of 
the administration of the town — the twenty-second on 
a list of thirty-six elected. He failed, however, in his 
attempt to be chosen "Procureur," and through all the 
year 1791 he keeps his place in the administration of 
Paris merely as a stepping-stone. He does not speak 
much in the Council. He used his partial success only 
for the purpose of attaining a definite position from which 
he could exercise some measure of executive control ; this 
position he finally attains (as we shall see) in the foUow- 

^ Aulard. The other biographers all assume that he did not resign. 
* Orateur du Peuple, vol. iii. No. 24. 
' Ibid., vol. vi. No. 27. 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 133 

ing December, and it is from it that he is able to direct 
the movement of 1792. 

The year 1791 does not form a unit in the story 
of the Revolution. It is cut sharply in two by the flight 
of the King in June. Before that event things went with 
a certain quietude. The tendency to reaction and the 
tendency to extreme democracy are to be discovered, but 
there can be no doubt that a kind of lassitude has taken 
the public mind. After all, the benefits of the Revolution 
are there. The two years of discussion, the useless acrimony 
of the preceding autumn, began to weary the voters — 
there is a sentiment of jovialty abroad. 

After the flight of the King all is changed. To a 
period of development there succeeds a period of violent 
advance, and of retreat yet more violent; there appears 
in France the first mention of the word republic, and all 
the characters that hung round Lafayette come definitely 
into conflict with the mass of the people. The action of 
the troops on the Champ de Mars opens the first of those 
impassable gulfs between the parties, and from that 
moment onward there arise the hatreds that are only 
satisfied by the death of political opponents. 

In that first period, then, which the death of Mirabeau 
was to disturb, the i8th of April to endanger, and the 
flight of the King to close, Danton's role, like that of all 
the democrats, is effaced. Why should it not be ? The 
violent discussions that followed the aflair of Nancy led, 
as it were, to a double satisfaction : the loyal party saw 
that after all the Radicals were not destroying the State ; 
the Radicals, on the other hand, had learnt that the 
loyalists could do nothing distinctly injurious to the 
nation without being discovered. At least, they thought 
they had learnt this truth. They did not know how for 
months Mirabeau had been in the pay of the Court, and 
how the executive power had concerned itself with the 
King rather than with the nation. 



134 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

A sign of this appeasement in the violence of the 
time (a movement, by the way, which was exactly what 
Danton desired) is his letter to La Rochefoucald, the 
president of the Department, when the successful election, 
which I have described above, was known. This letter, 
one of the very few which Danton has left, is a singularly 
able composition. He alludes to the mistrust which had 
been felt when his name was mentioned ; he does not deny 
the insurrectionary character of the quarter of Paris which 
he insphed. But he replies : " I will let my actions, 
now that I hold public office, prove my attitude, and if 
I am in a position of responsibility, it will have a special 
value in showing that I was right to continually claim 
the public control of administrative functions." The 
whole of the long letter ^ is very well put ; it is Danton 
himself that speaks, and it is hard to doubt that at this 
moment he also was one of those who thought they were 
touching the end of the reform, that goal which always 
fled from the men who most sincerely sought it. 

He did not, however, come often to the Council — to 
less than a quarter of its sittings, at the most ; moreover, 
the men who composed it still looked upon him with 
suspicion ; and when, on the 4th of May, the committees 
were drawn up, his name was omitted. He asked on the 
next day to be inscribed on the committee that contained 
Siey^s, and his request was granted. 

The activity of Danton during these few months was 
not even shown at the Cordeliers ; though that club occa- 
sionally heard him, it was at the Jacobins that he princi- 
pally spoke. 

This famous club, on which the root of the Revolution 
so largely depends, was at this period by no means the 
extreme and Robespierrian thing with which we usually 
associate the name. It hardly even called itself " the 

^ The letter will be found in M. Etienne Charavay's AssemhUe Electorale, 
p. 437. 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 135 

Jacobins " yet, but clung rather to its original name of 
" Friends of the Constitution." Its origin dated from the 
little gathering of Breton deputies who were in the habit, 
while the Assembly was still at Versailles, of meeting 
together to discuss a common plan of action. When 
the Assembly came to Paris, this society, in which by 
that time a very large number of deputies had enrolled 
themselves, took up their place in the hall of the 
Dominicans or "Jacobins," just off the Kue St. Honord. 
(Its site is just to the east of the square of Vendome to- 
day.) It was a union of all those who desired reform, 
and in the first part of the year 1790 it had been 
remarkable for giving a common ground where the 
moderate and extremist, all who desired reform, could 
meet. The Due de Broglie figures among its presidents. 
It was the Koyalists, the extreme Court party, that dubbed 
these "Friends of the Constitution" "Jacobins," and it 
was not till somewhat later that they themselves adopted 
and gloried in the nickname. It was composed not only 
of deputies, but of all the best-born and best-bred of the 
Parisian reformers, drawn almost entirely from the noble 
or professional classes, and holding dignified sessions, to 
which the public were not admitted. 

Almost at the same moment, namely, towards the 
autumn and winter of 1 790, two features appeared in it. 
First, the Moderates begin to leave it, and the schism 
which finally produced the " Feuillants " is formed ; 
secondly, there come in from all over France demands 
from the local popular societies to be affiliated to the 
great club in Paris. These demands were granted. 
There arises a kind of " Jacobin order," which penetrates 
even to the little country towns, everywhere preaches 
the same doctrine, everywhere makes it its business to 
keep a watch against reaction. These local clubs de- 
pended with a kind of superstition upon the decrees of 
what, without too violent a metaphor, we may call 



136 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

the " Mother House " in Paris ; it was this organisation 
that aroused the apathy of provincial France and trained 
the new voters in political discussion, and it was this also 
that was later captured by Eobespierre, who, like a kind 
of high priest, directed a disciplined body wherever the 
affiliated societies existed. 

Danton first joined the society at the very moment 
when this double change was in progress, in September 
1790. His energies, which were employed in the club to 
arrange the difficulty with the Moderates (if that were 
possible), were also used (to quote a well-known phrase) 
in " letting France hear Paris." The Cordeliers had been 
essentially Parisian ; steeped in that feeling, Danton spoke 
from the Kue St. Honore to the whole nation. 

It is with the end of March that he begins to be heard, 
in a speech attacking Collot d'Herbois; for that un- 
pleasant fellow was then a Moderate. It is apropos of 
that speech that the " Sabbots Jacobites " give us the 
satirical rhyme on Danton, which recalls his face when he 
spoke, looking all the ugHer for the energy which he put 
into his words : — 

" Monsieur Danton, 
Quittez cet air farouche, 

Monsieur Danton, 
On vous prendrez pour un ddmon." * 

On the 3rd of April it was known in Paris that 
Mirabeau was dead. He had been killed with the over- 
work of attempting to save the King from himself. A 
masterly intrigue, a double dealing which was hidden 
for a generation, had exhausted him, and in the terrible 
strain of balancing such opposite interests as those of 
France, which he adored, and Louis, whom he served, 
his two years of struggle suddenly fell upon him and 
crushed him. He smiled at the sun and called it God's 

^ I quote from M. Aulard, Rev. Fran^aise, March 14, 1893. 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 137 

cousin, boasted like a genius, gave a despairing phrase to 
the monarchy, demanded sleep, and died. 

Danton had always, from a long way off, understood 
his brother in silk and with the sword. On this day 
he passionately deplored the loss. Like all Paris, the 
Jacobins forgot Mirabeau's treason, and remembered his 
services when the news of his sudden death fell upon 
them. From their tribune Danton spoke in terms in which 
he almost alone foretold the coming reaction, and he was 
right. The King, hardly restrained from folly by the 
compromise of the great statesman, plunged into it when 
his support was withdrawn. He had been half Mirabeau's 
man, now he was all Antoinette's. 

It was the fatal question of religion that precipitated 
the crisis. Louis could not honestly receive the Easter 
communion from a constitutional priest. On the other 
hand, he might have received it quietly in his household. 
He chose to make it a public ceremony, and to go in 
state to St. Cloud for his Easter duties. It was upon 
April 1 8 th, a day or two more than a fortnight after 
Mirabeau's death, that he would have set out. As one 
might have expected, the streets filled at once. The 
many battalions of the National Guard who were on the 
democratic side helped the people to stop the carriage; 
in their eyes, as in that of the populace, the Bang's journey 
to St. Cloud was only part of the scheme to leave Paris 
to raise an army against the Assembly.^ 

On the other hand, those of the National Guard who 
obeyed Lafayette ^ could not, by that very fact, move 
until Lafayette ordered them. Thus the carriage was 
held for hours, until at last, in despair, the King went 
back to the Tuilleries. 

Meanwhile, what had occurred at the Hotel de Ville ? 

^ Note that Lafayette in his Memoirs (vol. iii. p. 64) talks of Danton 
"at the head of his battalion." I doubt an error on the part of a soldier 
whose business it was to know his own command. 

^ e.g. that of the quarter of the Carmelites (ibid.). 



138 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

The testimony is contradictory and tlie whole story 
confused, but the truth seems to have been something 
of this kind. Lafayette certainly called on the administra- 
tion of the Department and asked for martial law. Bailly 
as certainly was willing to grant it. Danton was called from 
his rank and came to oppose it; but did he end the 
matter by his speech ? Camille Desmoulins ^ says so, 
and draws a fine picture of Danton carrying the admini- 
stration with him, as he carried the club or the street. 
But Desmoulins is often inaccurate, and here his account 
is improbable. Danton's own note of the circumstance 
(which he thought worthy of being pinned to his family 
papers) runs : " I was present at the Department when 
MM. the commandant and the mayor demanded martial 
law." Nothing more. 

Desmoulins makes another mistake when he attri- 
butes to Danton the letter which was written to the King, 
and which was sent on the night of the 1 8 th ; it re- 
proached him for his action, sharply criticised his 
rejection of constitutional priests. It was not Danton, 
it was Talleyrand (a member also of the Department) 
who wrote this letter. 

It is probable that Danton and Tallejnrand knew each 
other. Talleyrand was a good judge of men, and would 
have many strings to his bow — we know that he 
depended upon Danton's kindness at a critical moment 
in 1792 — but the style of the letter is not Danton's, and 
the document as we find it in Schmidt is definitely 
ascribed to Tallejrrand. 

This is all we can gather as to his place in the 
popular uprising to prevent the King's leaving Paris. A 
placard of some violence issued from the Cordeliers, saying 
that he had " forbidden Lafayette to fire on the people ; " 
but Danton disowned it in a meeting of the Department. 

This much alone is certain, that the i8th of April 

^ Rivolutions de France et Brabant, No. 74. 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 139 

had finally put Danton and Lafayette face to face, and 
that in the common knowledge of Paris they would be 
the heads of opposing forces in the next crisis. But their 
roles turned out to be the very opposite of what men 
would have predicted. It was Lafayette who shot and 
blustered, and had his brief moment of power; it was 
Danton who made a flank movement and achieved a 
final victory. For the next crisis was the flight of 
the King. 

It would be irrelevant to give the story of this flight 
in the life of Danton. Our business is to understand 
Danton by following the exact course of his actions 
during June and July, and by describing exactly the 
nature of the movement in which his attitude took the 
form which we are investigating. 

Two things command the attention when we study 
the France of 1791. France was monarchic and France 
was afraid. History knows what was to follow ; the men 
of the time did not. There lay in their minds the 
centuries of history that had been ; their future was to 
them out of conception, and as unreal as our future is 
to us. You may notice from the very first moment of 
the true Revolution a passion for the King. For most 
he is a father, but for all a necessary nian. They took 
him back to Paris ; they forced him to declarations of 
loyalty, and then, with the folly of desire, accepted as 
real an emotion which they had actually dictated. Such 
was the movement of the 4th of February 1790; such 
the sentiment of the Federation in July of that year. 
And the people understood his reluctance in taking com- 
munion from a nonjuring priest, however much the upper 
class might be astonished. What no one understood 
was that only Mirabeau stood between the Crown and 
its vilest temptations ; only his balance of genius, his 
great and admirable fault of compromise, prevented Louis 
from yielding to his least kingly part, and while he lived 



I40 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

the king of the French preferred the nation to his own 
person. But Mirabeau was dead. They did well to 
mourn him, those who had smelt out his treason and 
guessed the weakness of the artist in him ; they did well 
to forgive him ; his head misunderstood France, but his 
broad French shoulders had supported her. The i8th 
of April was a direct consequence of his death; the 
2 1 St of June was a fall through a broken bridge : Louis 
had yielded to himself. 

Well, France was also afraid. This democracy (as it 
had come to be), an experiment based upon a vision, 
knew how perilous was the path between the old and 
the new ideals. She feared the divine sunstroke that 
threatens the road to Damascus. In that passage, which 
was bounded on either side by an abyss, her feet went 
slowly, one before the other, and she looked backward 
continually. In the twisting tides at night her one 
anchor to the old time was the monarchy. Thus when 
Louis fled the feeling was of a prop broken. France 
only cried out for one thing — "Bring the King back." 
Tie up the beam — a makeshift — anything rather than a 
new foundation. 

"^ Here is the attitude of Danton in this crisis. France 
is not republican ; his friends in Paris are. He inclines 
to France. It was Danton more than any other one 
man who finally prepared the Republic, yet the Republic 
was never with him an idea. The consequences of the 
Republic were his goal ; as for the systems, systems were 
not part of his mind. At the close of this chapter we 
shall see him overthrowing the Crown ; he did it because 
he thought it the one act that could save France ; but 
the Crown as an idea he never hated : he lived in existing 
things. 

These were the reasons that made him hesitate at 
this date. A man understanding Europe, he saw that 
the governments were not ready to move ; a man under- 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 141 

standing his own country, he saw that it would have the 
King in his place again ; a man, on the other hand, who 
had met and appreciated the idealists, he saw that the 
Republic already existed in the mind; and a man who 
understood the character of his fellows better than did 
any contemporary, he saw that the men who were bound 
to lead were inclined to a declaration against the King. 
He suffered more than his action should have warranted, 
and he goes through a sharp few days of danger on 
account of association and of friends in spite of all his 
caution. 

When Louis was known to have fled, and when Paris, 
vigilant beyond the provinces, and deceived by the de- 
claration of April, had undergone its first wave of passion, 
the word Republic began to be spoken out loud. The 
theorists found themselves for once in accordance with 
public humour; and against the keenness, if not the 
numbers, of those who petitioned for the deposition of 
the King on his return, there stood two barriers — the 
Assembly and the moderate fortunes of the capital. 
Danton lived with the former, thought with the latter, 
and was all but silent. 

The bust of Louis XIV. before the Hotel de Ville was 
broken; men climbed on ladders to chisel off the lilies 
from the palaces, and there soon appears a new portent : 
some one cries out, " Only a Republic can defend itself at 
the last." 

To this somewhat confused cry for a Republic came 
the very sharp announcement from no less a person than 
Condorcet. Condorcet, the moderate and illumined, was 
also half a visionary, and there had always floated in his 
mind the system of contract by which England had 
excused the movement of 1688, but which France took 
seriously. England had for him the attraction which it 
had for all the professionals of that date — an attraction 
which lasted till the disasters of 1870, and which you 



142 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

may yet discover here and there among those who are 
the heirs of Lamartine. England had given them Locke, 
and Condorcet's reasoning on the King's flight -^ reads like 
a passage from the Bill of Rights. Yet he was a good 
and sincere man, and died through simplicity of heart. 

On the 4th of July, ten days or more after the King 
had been brought back to Paris,^ it was Condorcet who 
made the demand for the Republic ; in a speech at 
Fauchet's club he asked for a National Convention to 
settle the whole matter. He wrote so in the papers^ 
all through July, and even after the affair of the Champ 
de Mars he continued his agitation. 

Now how do we know Danton's attitude ? The 
Cordeliers presented a petition of June 21st itself and 
demanded the Republic. It is largely from this docu- 
ment that the error has arisen. But Danton was not then 
with the Cordeliers ; his name does not appear. It is at 
the Jacobins that he is heard, and the Jacobins took up 
a distinctly monarchical position. They all rose in a 
body on the 22nd and passed a unanimous vote in favour 
of the constitution and the King.* Danton was present 
when this vote was passed, and he had just heard the 
hissing of the Cordeliers' petition ; he was silent. Thomas 
Payne is demanding the Republic in the Moniteur ; 
Sieyes replies for the monarchy;^ even Robespierre 
tardily speaks in favour of ideas and against change of 
etiquette; Marat shouts for a dictator;^ Danton, almost 
alone, refuses to be certain. On June 23 rd he spoke at 
the Jacobins in favour of a council to be elected by the 

1 See his Collected Works, vol. xii. pp. 264, 265. 

^ M. Aulard points out an error in Condorcet's own note (xii. p. 267), 
where it is mentioned as the 12th of July ; but the Bouche de Per of the loth 
gives us the above date over these two speeches. 

2 He wrote a funny little letter (among other things) to the HSpublicain 
of July 16, describing a "mechanical king," "who is practically eternal." 

* See SocUU des Jacobins, vol. ii. p. 541. 

^ Moniteur, July 16, 1791. 

8 Ami du Peu^le, June 22, 1791. 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 143 

Departments immediately, but lie proposed nothing as to 
its actions ; it was merely his permanent idea of a cen- 
tral, strong power. 

Lafayette amused himself by arresting people who 
repeated this in the street, but Lafayette hated Danton 
blindly. Nothing republican can be made of a speech 
which his enemies said was " a loophole for Orleans." 

Danton attacked Lafayette : he saw persons more 
clearly than ideas, and Lafayette was Danton's night- 
mare. He was that being which of all on earth Danton 
thought most dangerous, the epitome of all the faults 
Avhich he attacked to the day of his death ; in Louis, in 
Robespierre, " The weak man in power." He drove him 
out of the Jacobins on the 21st, and later in the day 
gave the cry against his enemy in the street, which the 
fears of the Assembly so much exaggerated. 

For the events of the twenty-four hours had all 
added to his natural opposition to Lafayette, and as we 
relate them from Danton's standpoint, we shall see this 
much of truth in the idea that he led the movement, 
namely, that the three days of the King's flight and 
recapture, while they put Lafayette into a position of 
great power, made also Danton his antagonist, the leader 
of the protest against the general's methods. It is the 
more worthy of remark that in such conditions the word 
" Republic " never crossed his lips. 

At eleven o'clock at night on the Monday of the 
King's flight, Danton and Desmoulins were coming home 
alone from the Jacobins. Each remarked to the other 
the emptiness of the streets and the lack of patrols, and 
at that moment, when the evasion was little suspected, 
each was in a vague doubt that Lafayette had some 
reason for concentrating the National Guard.^ Desmoulins 
will even have it that he saw him enter the palace, as 
the two friends passed the Tuilleries. 

^ Evolutions de France et de Brabant, No. 82. 



144 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

The next morning at the Cordeliers Danton cried out 
against Lafayette for a moment, and then at the Jacobins 
he made the speech that has been mentioned above. Con- 
tinually he attacks the man who was preparing a counter- 
revolution, but I do not believe he would have attached 
the least importance at that moment to a change in 
the etiquette of government. Thus, as the Department 
was sent for by the Assembly in the afternoon, Danton 
came later than his colleagues, provided himself with 
a guard, and as he crossed the Tuilleries gardens he 
harangued the people, but against Lafayette, not against 
the King. 

Now, to make sure of this feature, the duel between 
Lafayette and Danton, and to see that it is the principal 
thing at the time, turn once more to the scene at the 
Jacobins, and compare it with Lafayette's Memoirs, and 
you will find that Danton was the terror of the saviour 
of two worlds, and that it was upon Lafayette that Danton 
had massed his artillery. 

Here is Danton at the Jacobins, sitting by Desmou- 
lin's side; he goes to the tribune and speaks upon the 
disgrace and danger that the Moderates have brought 
about. When Lafayette entered during the speech, he 
turned upon him suddenly, and launched one of those 
direct phrases which made him later the leader of the 
Convention : " I am going to talk as though I were at 
the bar of God's justice, and I will say before you, M. 
Lafayette, what I would say in the presence of Him who 
reads all hearts. . . . How was it that you, who pretend 
to know nothing of me, tried to corrupt me to your views 
of treason ? . . . How was it that you arrested those who 
in last February demanded the destruction of Vincennes ? 
You are present; try to give a clear reason. . . . How 
was it that the very same men were on guard when the 
King tried to go to St. Cloud on the 1 8 th of April were 
on guard last night when the King fled ? . . . I will not 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 145 

mention the 6000 men-' whom you liave picked as a 
garrison for the Kjng; only answer clearly these three 
accusations. For in their light you, who answered with 
your head that the King should not fly, are either a 
traitor or a fool. For either you have permitted him to 
fly, or else you undertook a responsibility which you could 
not fulfil : in the best case, you are not capable of com- 
manding the guard. ... I will leave the tribune, for I 
have said enough." ^ 

This is clear enough in all conscience to show what 
was Danton's main pre-occupation in the days of June 
1 79 1. And if, upon the other hand, you will turn to 
Lafayette's Memoirs, the third volume, the 83rd and 
following pages, you will find that Danton was Lafayette's 
pre-occupation, and that he makes this moment the 
occasion to deliver the most definite and (luckily) the 
most demonstrably false of his many accusations of vena- 
lity. He tells us that he could not reply because it 
would have " cost Montmorin his life ; " that Montmorin 
"had the receipt for the 100,000 francs;" that Danton 
had been "reimbursed to the extent of 100,000 francs 
for a place worth 1 0,000," and so forth. We know now 
exactly the amount of compensation paid to him and his 
colleagues at the court of appeal,^ and we know that 
Lafayette, writing a generation later, animated by a bitter 
hatred, and remembering that somebody had paid Danton 
something, and with his head full of vague rumours of 
bribing, has fallen into one of those unpardonable errors 
common to vain and vacillating men. But at this junc- 

^ This is not a rhetorical exaggeration. It indicates, as will be seen 
later in the chapter, the very number that finally formed the garrison of 
the palace — a point not hitherto noticed, and well worth remembering, 
for it shows how Lafayette's accusations are half the truth. He had 
approached Danton, and he had told him many of his plans. Danton had 
not acceded, but he used the knowledge. 

^ Revolutions de France et de Brabant, No. 82. 

^ Appendix II. 

K 



146 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

ture tlie main point tliat should be seized is tlaat Danton 
was taking the opportunity of the King's evasion to attack 
Lafayette with all his might, and that a generation later 
the old man chiefly remembered Danton as leading the 
popular anger which the commander of the guard thought 
himself bound to repress. It is this that will explain 
why Danton, who so carefully avoided giving the word 
for the Republican "false start," was yet marked out, 
fled, and returned to lead the opposition. 

The Cordeliers followed Danton's lead. They got up 
a petition,^ signed by 30,000 in Paris, demanding that 
the affair should be laid before the country, but not de- 
manding the abolition of the monarchy. Memdar, their 
president, declared himself a monarchist. But the peti- 
tion, though read at the Assembly, was not adopted, and, 
on the 9th of July, the Cordeliers presented another. 
Charles de Lameth (who was president that fortnight) 
refused to read it. The Assembly, in other words, was 
dumb ; it was determined (like its successor a year later) 
to do nothing — an attitude which (for all it knew) might 
be very wise, and those who were following Danton deter- 
mined upon a definite policy. On Friday the 15th, at 
the Jacobins, it was determined to draw up a petition 
which begged that the Assembly should first recognise 
Louis as having abdicated by his flight, unless the nation 
voted his reinstatement, and secondly (in case the nation 
did not do so), take measures to have him constitutionally 
replaced. Now the constitution was monarchist. 

The petition was to be taken to be read at the Champ 
de Mars on the altar, and there to obtain signatures. It 
was drawn up by Danton, Sergent, Lanthanas, Ducanel, 
and Brissot, who wrote it out and worded most of it. 
The events that follow must be noted with some care, 
because on their exact sequence depends our judgment 
of Lafayette's action and of Danton's politics. 

^ On June 24. 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 147 

On Saturday -^ the 1 6th, about mid-day, a deputation 
of four from the Jacobins came to the Champ de Mars. 
The petition was read by a little light-haired Englishman 
on one side, and by a red-haired Frenchman in a red 
coat on the other; picturesque but unimportant details. 
Danton leapt on to the corner of the altar, and read it 
again to the thick of the crowd. The signatures were 
written in great numbers, and when the completed docu- 
ment was about to start for the Assembly, when the depu- 
tation that was to take it was already formed, it was 
suddenly spread abroad that the Assembly had passed a 
vote exonerating Louis. 

The Jacobins were appealed to, and replied that under 
the conditions the petition which they had drawn up 
could not be presented. The Cordeliers, however, lost 
their tempers, and Eobert determined to draw up a new 
petition. Now in this second action Danton took no 
part. It was this new petition that (signed by Kobert, 
Vejre, Vachard, and Demoy) was drawn up hastily in the 
Champ de Mars on Sunday the 17 th, to this that the 
6000 signatures were attached, and this which demanded 
a " Convention to judge the King." There followed the 
proclamation of martial law, the appearance of Lafayette 
and Bailly in the Champ de Mars with the red flag, the 
conflict between the National Guard and the crowd, and 
all that is called the "Massacre of the Champ de 
Mars." 

That petition was not signed by Danton.^ He was 
not even present,^ as we know from his speech on his 

^ I follow Anlard in this as to the general scheme, and largely as to 
authorities also. 

2 Aulard is my authority for the fact that the actual text of this second 
petition disappeared in 187 1, when the Hotel de Villa was burnt by the 
Commune, but that Berchez saw it before that event, and carefully drew 
up a list of the principal names. Danton is not among them. 

^ The Courrier Franqais of July 22 asks if " the man in holland trousers 
and a grey waistcoat was Danton," but says nothing more. 



148 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

election to be " Substitut-Procureur," and especially from 
the fact that in the fortnight of terror, when the red flag 
stood over the Hotel de Ville, when the democrats were 
arrested or in hiding, when the door of the Cordeliers 
was shut and nailed, and when the Radical newspapers 
were suppressed, no warrant of arrest could be issued, 
because there existed nothing definite against him. La- 
fayette was determined, however, to act in a military 
fashion, and on the 4th of August the arrest of Danton 
was ordered, on some other plea which he alludes to in 
his speech of the next January, but the exact terms of 
which have not come down to us. 

He had left Paris at once when he saw that Lafayette 
had practically absolute power for the moment. He first 
went to his father-in-law's, Charpentier, at Rosny-sur-Bois, 
and then escaped to Arcis. Before the warrant was 
actually made out, Lafayette had sent a man to watch 
him at Arcis. He was " giving a dinner. It would need 
a troop of cavalry to arrest him. Everybody was on his 
side." ^ Marseilles and Bar spoke up for him. But the 
attack only grew stronger. On the 3 1 st of July he 
moved again to Troyes, to the house of Millaud, of his 
father's profession, and a friend, because he feared a new 
arrival from Paris who seemed a spy.^ He was there 
when the warrant was sent down to the " procureur " for 
the arrest ; the official in question was Beugnot, and 
Beugnot told Danton jocularly that he would not arrest 
him. He did not think this a sufficient guarantee, and 
as his stepfather, Recordain, was off to England to buy 
some machinery for a cotton-mill that he thought of 
starting, Danton went to England with him, and re- 
mained in this country for a month, staying in the house 
of his stepfather's sons, who were established in London. 
It was in the last days of July or the first days in 

1 See the letter published in the Rev. Franpaise, April 1893, p. 325. 
^ Orateur du Pewple, viii. No. i6. Not over -trustworthy. 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 149 

August'^ that lie arrived, and lie did not return to 
Paris until tlie appointment of his friend Garran de 
Coulon as President of the Court of Appeal. He appears 
again at the Jacobins on the 12th of September; some 
say he was in Paris on the loth.^ 

It would be of the utmost interest to know how he 
passed those thirty or forty days. Unfortunately there is 
no direct evidence as to whom he met or what negotia- 
tions he entered into. As to his English acquaintances, 
his letters from Priestley and Christie, the relations he 
had with Talleyrand, and their common diplomacy for the 
English alliance — all these properly belong to Danton in 
power, the minister directing France after August 1792, and 
it is in that place that they will be dealt with. Of his- 
torical events in his voyage we have none, and there is 
no more regrettable gap in the very disconnected series 
of ascertained facts concerning him. 

On his return, he discovered that the Section of the 
Theatre Fran^ais had named him a member of the electoral 
college which sat at the Archbishop's palace. Many mem- 
bers of this Assembly had been arrested, or had fled during 
Lafayette's violent efforts of reaction in August and Septem- 
ber. The new Parliament which had just met did not 
decree an amnesty (as it was asked to do on the 5 th of 
September), but it was of course far more democratic than 
the old Assembly, and it was understood to be tacitly in 
favour of the return of those whom Lafayette had driven 
out. Following Danton's example, they slowly came back ; 
but a curious incident shows how much of the danger 
remained. 

^ Possibly later. Beugnot seems to speak as though Danton was still 
in Troyes on at least as late a date as the 6th of August {Memoires, i. pp. 
249-250). 

^ Since writing the above I notice that M. Aulard in the same article 
quotes a remark of Danton's in the Electoral Assembly of September loth. 
This is taken from the proems verbal of the Assembly, and M. Charavay 
communicated it to M. Aulard. 



I50 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

On tlie 13 th of September the Parliament, at tlie 
desire of tlie King, voted tlie amnesty. While it was 
actually voting, a constable called Damien got into the 
gallery of the hall in which Danton and the electors were 
debating, and sent a note to the president asking him to 
allow the arrest. The president and the electoral college 
(who did not like Danton, by the way, and who would 
not give him more than forty votes when it came to elect- 
ing members for Paris) yet ordered the arrest by Damien, 
and it was only when they learnt of the amnesty that, on 
Danton's own motion, he was released. 

It has just been said that Danton failed to be elected: 
let us point out the conditions under which the Legisla- 
tive met, that short Parliament of one year which made 
the war, and saw to its dismay the end of the monarchy. 

The Legislative was not elected in one of those moments 
of decision which were the formative points of the Eevolu- 
tion. It came upon a very curious juncture, and showed 
in all its first acts a marked indecision. 

The members were chosen under the action of a 
peculiar combination, or rather confusion of emotions. 
The King had fled, had been recaptured. France, of many 
possible evils, had chosen what she believed to be the 
least when she reinstated him. " The New Pact " was 
accepted even by those who had spoken of the Republic 
in July. Condorcet, who had led the civic theorists 
towards the Republic, leads them also now in this move- 
ment of reconcihation. Again, these were the first elec- 
tions held since the middle class and the peasantry had 
been given the suffrage over the heads of the artisans: 
it was the most sober part of France that dictated the 
policy of the moment. The divisions that the King's 
flight had laid bare, the sharp reaction and terror of the 
Champ de Mars — all these were forgotten. 

Thus the Parliament will not have Garran-Conlon for 
its first president, and yet on the next day passes the 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 151 

extreme democratic etiquette as to the reception of the 
King should he visit the Assembly. Next day it repeals 
this, and when the King does visit the Assembly, he is met 
by an outburst of loyalty and affection. 

As to parties, the power lay, as it always does in a 
French Assembly, with the centre — some three hundred 
men, unimportant, of no fixed idea, unless indeed it were 
to keep the Legislative to the work for which it had been 
elected, that is, to keep it moving moderately on the lines 
laid down for it by the constitution of 1791. 

The right, well organised, loyal and brave, was Feuil- 
lant; that is, it was monarchic and constitutional, but 
more monarchic than constitutional. It was the support 
of Lafayette, and on the whole the centre would vote with 
it on any important occasion. 

But there sat on the left a group less compact, full of 
personal ambitions and personal creeds, containing almost 
all the orators whose names were to make famous the 
following year. It was but a group of 130 men, even if we 
include all those who signed the register of the Jacobins 
when the Assembly met; yet it was destined, ill-disciplined 
as it was, part wild and part untrue, to lead all France. 
Why? Because the King was to make impossible the 
action of the Moderates, because his intrigue made French- 
men choose between him and France, and in the inevitable 
war the men who were determined to realise the Revolu- 
tion could not but be made the leaders. 

As has been said above, Danton was not elected. 
The electoral college, of which he was a member, chose 
Moderates for the most part, such as Pastoret and De 
Quincy, and the narrow suffrage represented the true drift 
of Parisian feeling only in the case of a few — De Sechelles, 
Brissot, Condorcet, and a handful of others. But though 
Danton did not sit in the Legislative he was free for action 
in two other directions, which (as it turned out) were the 
commanding positions in the great changes that came with 



152 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

the war. He was free to attain an administrative position 
in the municipality of Paris, and he was free to use his 
power of oratory at the Jacobins. 

As to the first, it came with his moderate but im- 
portant success in the municipal elections at the close of 
the year. Bailly, frightened out of place, half-regretting 
his action of the Champ de Mars, had resigned, and 
Petion, on November i6th, was elected in his place. 
Only ten thousand voted, and he obtained 6700 votes. 
On the same day the Procureur of the new Commune 
was to be elected. A Procureur under the new system 
was a position of the greatest importance. He was, so 
to speak, the advocate of the town, its tribune in the 
governing body, and with his two substitutes (who aided 
and occasionally replaced him) was meant to form a kind 
of small committee whose business was to watch the 
interests and to define the attitude of the electorate 
whenever those interests were in jeopardy or that atti- 
tude was opposed to the policy of the elected body. 
These three positions were dangerous, but would lead to 
popularity, and perhaps to power, if they were directed 
by a certain kind of ability. It was precisely such a 
power, the quality of a tribune, that Danton knew him- 
self to possess. 

His candidature for the principal position was cordi- 
ally supported by the Cordeliers, but the Jacobins were 
divided, and they hesitated. Manuel was elected, and 
Danton obtained only the third place. This vote, how- 
ever, was not decisive, and there was a second ballot on 
December the 2nd. In this Manuel was definitely elected. 

Cahier de Gerville (the second substitute) was made 
Minister of the Interior, and Danton, on December 6th,^ 
was elected to his place by a majority of 500 over Collot 
d'Herbois. It was from this position that he prepared 
the I oth of August, and it was still as substitute that he 

^ His election was not declared till the 7th, but was known on the 6th. 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 153 

remained side by side with the insurrectionary commune, 
and lending it something of legal sanction when the 
King was overthrown. 

Let me, before leaving this point, define exactly the 
position in which his new dignity placed him. Three 
men were charged with the advocacy of public opinion, 
the Procureur and his two substitutes. Manuel, who was 
elected to the principal position, was energetic, kindly, 
and conscientious, but a man of no genius ; he was good 
to Madame De Stael in the days of September, as is 
apparent from her rather contemptuous description of 
how she appealed to him for safety ; he did his very best 
(with no power in his hands) to stop the massacres at that 
same time. He was fond of work, and a little pompous 
in his idea of office ; he was, therefore, a man who would 
only leave his substitutes the less important work to do, 
and, from close by, would have been the dominating 
member of the three. On the other hand, his lack of 
decision and of initiative effaced him in moments of 
danger or of new departures, and it is thus his second 
substitute who seems to lead when seen from a distance, 
from the point of view of the people, who only look 
round when there is a noise. 

The first substitute was Desmousseaux. He had 
not resigned, and had therefore not been re-elected. 
Forming part of the old Commune, and in office since 
the winter of 1790, he was a Moderate by preference and 
long tradition. 

As for Danton himself, standing third in the group, 
it was for him a position of honour and of dignity. That 
part of him which was so capable of high office and so 
desirous of an opportunity to act was well served by the 
election. It seemed to put a term to the misconcep- 
tions which his person, his faults, and the course of the 
Revolution had created. But the great stream of events 
moved him at their will. This office wherein he desired 



154 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

to appear settled at last, to show himself an administrator 
rather than a leader of unreasoning men, was precisely 
suited in case of danger to call out those other qualities 
which had made him despised by many whom he himself 
respected, and had aroused against him hatred — a passion 
which he himself had never allowed to arise from anger. 

If the spirit of 1791 had been kept, and if after so 
many false promises the Revolution had been really 
accomplished, then the official, or, if you will, the states- 
man, would have appeared in him. I can see him in the 
difficulties which even a settled kingdom would have had 
to meet, convincing his contemporaries as he has convinced 
posterity. He was the man to impress on others the 
true attitude of Europe — the only diplomat among the 
patriots. His disadvantages were of the kind that are 
forgotten in the constant proof of ability ; and his learn- 
ing, which was exactly of the kind to be used in the new 
regime (a knowledge of languages, of law, of surrounding 
nations, a combination of detail and of comprehension) — 
this learning v/ould have made necessary a man so popular 
with the people to be ruled, and, in the matter of the 
heart, so honestly devoted to his country. Had France, 
I say, by some miracle been spared her Passion, and had 
she been permitted to be happier and to do less for the 
world, then as the new regime settled into the lower 
reaches of quiet and content, I believe Danton would 
have remained for us a name, perhaps less great, but 
certainly among the first. England has been permitted. 
She has been given good fortune, and no fate has asked 
her to save civilisation with her blood, and therefore in 
England we are accustomed to such careers ; men whose 
origin, whose exterior, and whose faults might have exiled 
them, have yet been seen to rise from the municipal 
to the imperial office, because they were possessed of 
supreme abilities, and because they devoted those abilities 
to the service of England. They have died in honour. 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 155 

I will not discuss what it was that made tlie war. 
There are no causes. Burke raved like a madman, but 
then so did Marat. The King was alienated by the 
clerical laws, but nothing is an excuse for treason. Pil- 
nitz was an affront and even a menace, but it was not a 
declaration of war. There were peoples behind the kings, 
as Mayence tragically proved ; and if France fought into- 
lerable evils, she also seemed the iconoclast when she put 
out the altar-lamp, which she is lighting again with her 
own hand. There are no causes. Only, if you will look 
and see how Europe has lived, and how our great things 
have been done, you will find nothing but armies upon 
armies marching past, and our history is an epic whose 
beginning is lost, whose books are Roncesvalles and 
Cortenuova and Waterloo, and whose end is never reached. 
The war came, and with it a definite necessity to choose 
between France and the Crown. In that crisis Danton is 
thrown back upon insurrection. He, who desired men to 
forget the days of October, was compelled to the loth 
of August because he was aroused. Even the massacres 
were attached to his name, and there still trails after him 
an easy flow of accusation, only a little less sordid or less 
terrible. 

To follow his action during the first months of 1772, 
to hear his speeches on the war, and to note his policy, 
we must leave him at his post in the Commune (where 
we shall find him again when Paris rises in the summer), 
and see how he stands for the Mountain at the Jacobins. 

This club was now definitely the organ of the left. It 
was after Danton had been elected, but before he was defi- 
nitely installed in ofiice,-^ on the 1 4th of December, a week 
after the former and five weeks before the latter event, that 
the debate on the war was begun at the Jacobins, — a debate 
of the first importance, because it opened the breach between 
the Girondins and the Mountain, between the orators who 
^ January 20, 1792. 



156 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

insisted on going to meet Europe, and even on a war of 
propaganda, and the reformers who wished Europe to 
take the first step, who dreaded war or who thought a 
war of aggression immoral. At the head of these last 
was Robespierre. But it is not too much to say that in 
the first months of the year Danton was more important 
at the Jacobins than Robespierre. What was his attitude ? 
It was part of the general policy upon which he had 
determined : he compromised. In his first motion on the 
1 4th of December, he attacked the idea of declaring war. 
On the 1 6th he still attacked it, but in other terms. " I 
know it must come. If any one were to ask me, 'Are 
we to have war ? ' I would reply (not in argument, but 
as a matter of fact), ' We shall hear the bugles.' " But 
the whole speech is taken up with an argument upon its 
dangers, and especially upon " those who desire war in 
the hope of reaction, who talk of giving us a constitution 
like that of England, in the hope of giving us, later, one 
like that of Turkey." 

In March and April, the months when the war was 
preparing and was declared, he was silent. And we can 
understand his silence when we turn to his speech in the 
Commune when he was given office. He alludes to the 
false character given him ; he speaks of the reputation 
which his past actions in Paris had given; he says things 
that indicate a determination to play the part of a 
Moderate, and to see whether in his case, as in that of so 
many others, there would not be permanence in the com- 
promise of the last six months. But there rankled in his 
mind the insults of the men with whom he sat, Condor- 
cet's disavowal in his paper of so much as knowing 
Danton, and he made a peroration which at the time 
offended, but which possesses for us a certain pathos. 
" Nature gave me a strong frame, and she put into my face 
the violence of liberty. I have not sprung from a family 
which was weakened by the protection of the old privileges ; 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 157 

my existence has been all my own ; I know tliat I have 
kept and shown my vigour, but in my profession and in 
my private life I have controlled it. If I was carried 
away by enthusiasm in the first days of our regeneration, 
have I not atoned for it ? Have I not been ostracised ? 
... I have given myself altogether to the people, and 
now that they are beyond attack, now that they are in 
arms and ready to break the league unless it consents to 
dissolve,^ I will die in their cause if I must, ... for I 
love them only, and they deserve it. Their courage will 
make them eternal." 

This outburst is the one occasion of his public life in 
which Danton spoke of himself, and it has the ring of 
genuine emotion ; for in all his harangues he preserved, 
both before and after this, an objective attitude, if any- 
thing too much bent upon the outward circumstances. 

Thus, when the notes came to go between the Austrian 
and the French governments, he was silent. He fears that 
France is unprepared; he fears that the King is be- 
traying the nation. How much he was a traitor was 
not known till a far later period ; but when at least 
it is proved that something is imdermining the French 
people, that, apart from the defeats and the lack of 
preparation, there is treason, then he leaves his silence. 
The policy of the Moderate acting in a settled state is no 
longer possible to any one ; the court and the nation stood 
one against the other, and one side or the other must be 
taken by every man. Then he put off the conventions 
which he respected, and which he regretted to the end ; 
he went back into the street ; he headed the insurrection, 
destroyed the monarchy ; for twelve months he took upon 
himself all the responsibility of errors in his own policy, 
and of crime in that of his associates. He saved France, 
but at this expense, that he went out of the world with a 
reputation which he knew to be false, that he saw his 

^ I see in that phrase all Danton's attitude upon the war. 



158 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

great powers vulgarised, and that lie could never possess, 
either in his own mind or before the world, not even in 
France, his true name. The whole of this tragedy is to 
be found in his trial, and here and there in the few 
phrases that escape him in the speeches or with his 
friends. If you sum it up, it comes to this paraphrase of 
a great sentence : Son nom Stait fidtri mais la France 4tait 
libre. 

It was upon April the 1 8 th that the new Girondin 
ministry received the note from Vienna rejecting the 
French proposals of a month before. The poor King, 
who had been protesting his loyalty to the nation in 
Paris, had been protesting in Vienna the necessity of 
sending an army to save him, and Austria gave this 
reply. On April 20th the Assembly declared war with 
practical unanimity^ upon " the King of Hungary and of 
Bohemia." But the phrase was useless. You might as 
well put a match into gunpowder and say, "It is the 
sulphur I am after, not the charcoal." Prussia joined, 
and within a year we shall see all Europe at war with 
France, in a war that outlawed and destroyed. 

Danton was right. France was hopelessly unready. 
She had not learnt the necessary truth that the soldier is 
a man with a trade. The orators had mistaken words 
for things ; honest and great as they were, they had fallen 
in this matter into the faults common to small and dis- 
honest verbiage. The rout and panic under De Dillon, 
his murder by the troops, the occupation of Qui^vrain, 
came one upon the other. Paris was full of terror and 
anger in proportion to the greatness of the things she 
had done, which now seemed all destroyed. " We said 
and did things that should have convinced the world; 
we were to be a people unconquerable from our love 
of liberty, and we appear a beaten, panic-stricken lot 
— volunteers and babblers who cannot stand fire." 

^ There was a minority of seven. 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 159 

The King dismissed the Girondin ministers, even sent 
Dumouriez away, heard Roland's remonstrance, knew 
that the Assembly was more and more against him ; but 
he remained calm. There was a plan of the simplest. 
There was to be nothing but a few days of monotonous 
marching between the allies and Paris. Lafayette with 
his army of the centre was on his side. The Assembly 
decreed a great camp of 20,000 men under Paris, and 
the disbanding of the guard; the guard was disbanded, 
but the King vetoed the decree. Lafayette wrote his 
letter menacing the Parliament with his army; the re- 
action seemed in full success and the invaders secure, 
when Danton reappeared. 

On the 1 8 th of June he found the old phrases 
against Lafayette at the Jacobins. "It is a great day 
for France ; Lafayette with only one face on is no longer 
dangerous." He did not make, but he permitted the 
20th of June ; and as Paris rose, and the immense mob, 
grotesque, many-coloured, armed with all manner of 
sharp things, passed before the Assembly and into the 
Tuilleries, it might have been a signal or a warning. 
The excited citizen makes a poor soldier, but if Paris 
moves the whole great body of France stirs. Such giants 
take long to be fully awake, and it is a matter of months 
to drill men ; still it is better to let great enemies sleep. 
There was in that foolish, amiable crowd, with its pleasure 
at the sight of the King, its comic idea of warning him, 
something serious underlying. Danton will be using it 
in a very short time ; for there are points of attack where 
mobs are like machine-guns — ridiculous in general war- 
fare, but very useful indeed in special conditions, and in 
these conditions invincible. This something serious was 
that vague force (you may call it only an idea) which you 
will never find in an individual, and which you will 
always discover in a mass — the great common man 
which the French metaphysicians have called* "Le 



i6o THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Peuple ; " that, drilled, is called by the least metaphysical 
an army. 

A week later Lafayette appeared. He demanded the 
right to use the army, and July opened with the certainty 
of civil war. 

July is the month of fevers ; the heat has been 
moving northward, and all France is caught in it. The 
grapes fill out, and even in Picardy or in the Cotentin 
you feel as though the Midi were giving her spirit to the 
north. July made the Revolution and closed it. A 
month that saw the Bastille fall and that buried Robes- 
pierre is a very national time. 

If you overlook France at this moment, you may see 
the towns stirring as they had stirred three years before ; 
it is from them that the opposition rises — especially from 
Marseilles. A crowd of young men dragging cannon, the 
common-place sons of bourgeois, whom the time had 
turned into something as great as peasants or as soldiers, 
surged up the white deserts along the Rhone, passing 
the great sheet of vineyards that slopes up the watershed 
of Burgundy. As they came along they sang an excel- 
lent new marching song. When they at last saw Paris, 
especially the towers of Notre Dame from where they 
just show above the city as you come in from Fontaine- 
bleau, and as the roads came in together and the suburbs 
thickened they sang it with louder voices. On the even- 
ing of the 3 oth they came to the gates, and the workmen 
of the south-eastern quarter began to sing it and called it 
the " Marseillaise." No one can describe music ; but if 
in a great space of time the actions of the French become 
meaningless and the Revolution ceases to be an origin, 
some one perhaps will recover this air, as we have 
recovered a few stray notes of Greek music, and it will 
carry men back to the Republic. 

For ten days the insurrection grew. In a secret 
committee which the Sections formed, men violent like 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY i6i 

Fournier, or good soldiers like Westermann, or local 
leaders of quarters like Santerre — but all outside the 
official body — organised the fighting force, and at their 
head the one man who held the strings of the munici- 
pality — Danton. The Assembly had heard Yergniaud's 
angry speech, but it had also confirmed the constitution 
and the monarchy in the " baiser Lamourette," Paris 
had to work alone, and the King, seeing only Paris before 
him, filled the Tuilleries, and stood by with a small 
garrison to repress the mere movement of the city — ■ 
" something that should have been done in '89." ^ 

It was on a Paris thus enfevered, doubtful, nursing 
a secret insurrectionary plan, but full of men who hesi- 
tated and doubted, having still many who were loyal, that 
there fell^ the document which the King had asked of 
his friends — but which he must, on seeing it, have regretted 
— the manifesto of the commander of the allies. This 
extraordinary monument of folly is rarely presented in 
its entirety. It is only in such a form that its full 
monstrosity can be appreciated, and I have therefore been 
at pains to translate for my readers the rather halting 
French in which Charles William proposed to arrest the 
movements of Providence. It ran as follows ^ : — 

" Their Majesties the Emperor and the King of Prussia 
having given me the command of the armies assembled 
on the French frontier, I have thought it well to tell 
the inhabitants of that kingdom the motives that have 
inspired the measures taken by the two sovereigns and 
the intentions that guide them. 

"After having arbitrarily suppressed the rights and 
the possessions of the German princes in Alsace and 
Lorraine, troubled and overset public order and their 
legitimate government, exercised against the sacred person 
of the Eong and agamst his august family violence which 

1 Perhaps as early as the evening of the 28th. 

2 This account is translated from the Moniteur, August 3, 1792. 

L 



i62 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

is (moreover) repeated and renewed from day to day, 
those who have usurped the reins of the administration 
have at last filled up the measure by causing an unjust 
war to he declared against his Majesty the Emperor, and 
by attacking his provinces in the Netherlands. 

" Several possessions of the German Empire have been 
drawn into this oppression, and several others have only 
escaped from a similar danger by yielding to the impe- 
rious threats of the dominant party and its emissaries. 

" His Prussian Majesty with his Imperial Majesty, 
by the ties of a strict and defensive alliance, and himself 
a preponderant member of the Germanic body (sic), has 
therefore been unable to excuse himself from going to 
the aid of his ally and of his fellow State (sic). And 
it is under both these heads that he undertakes the 
defence of that monarch and of Germany. 

" To these great interests another object of equal 
importance must be added, and one that is near to the 
heart of the two sovereigns: it is that of ending the 
domestic anarchy of France, of arresting the attacks 
which are directed against the altar and the throne, of 
re-establishing the legitimate power, of giving back to the 
King the freedom and safety of which he is deprived, 
and of giving him the means to exercise the lawful 
authority which is his due. 

" Convinced as they are that the healthy part of the 
French people abhors the excesses of a party that enslaves 
them, and that the majority of the inhabitants are im- 
patiently awaiting the advent of a relief that will permit 
them to declare themselves openly against the odious 
schemes of their oppressors. His Majesty the Emperor 
and His Majesty the King of Prussia call upon them 
to return at once to the call of reason and justice, of 
order, of peace. It is in view of these things that I, 
the undersigned, General Commander-in-Chief of the 
two armies, declare — 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 163 

"(i) That led into the present war by irresistible 
circumstances, the two allied courts propose no object to 
themselves but the happiness of France, and do not 
propose to enrich themselves by annexation. 

" (2) That they have no intention of meddling with 
the domestic government of France, but only wish to 
deliver the King, and the Queen, and the Pioyal Family 
from their captivity, and procure for his Most Christian 
Majesty that freedom which is necessary for him to call 
such a council as he shall see fit, without danger and 
without obstacle, and to enable him to work for the good 
of his subjects according to his promises and as much as 
may be his concern. 

"(3) That the combined armies will protect all towns, 
boroughs, and villages, and the persons and goods of all 
those that will submit to the King, and that they will 
help to re-establish immediately the order and police 
of France. 

"(4) That the National Guard are ordered to see to 
the peace of the towns and country-sides provisionally, 
and to the security of the persons and goods of all French- 
men provisionally, that is, until the arrival of the troops 
of their Koyal and Imperial Majesties, or until further 
orders, under pain of being personally responsible ; that 
on the contrary, the National Guards who may have 
fought against the troops of the allied courts, and who 
are captured in arms, shall be treated as enemies, and 
shall be punished as rebels and disturbers of the public 
peace. 

"(5) That the generals, officers, non-commissioned 
oflScers, and privates of the French troops of the line are 
equally ordered to return to their old allegiance and to 
submit at once to the King, their legitimate sovereign. 

" (6) That the members of departmental, district, 
and town councils are equally responsible with their 
heads and property for all crimes, arson, murders, thefts, 



164 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

and assaults, the occurrence of whicli they allow or do 
not openly, and to the common knowledge, try to prevent 
in their jurisdiction ; that they shall equally be bound to 
keep their functions provisionally until his Most Christian 
Majesty, reinstated in full liberty, has further decreed; 
or until, in the interval, other orders shall have been 
given. 

"(7) That the inhabitants of towns, boroughs, and 
villages who may dare to defend themselves against the 
troops of their Imperial and Royal Majesties by firing 
upon them, whether in the open or from the windows, 
doors, or apertures of their houses, shall be punished at 
once with all the rigour of the laws of war, their houses 
pulled down or burnt. All those inhabitants, on the 
contrary, of the towns, boroughs, and villages who shall 
hasten to submit to their King by opening their gates to 
the troops of their Majesties shall be placed under the 
immediate protection of their Majesties ; their persons, 
their goods, their chattels shall be under the safeguard 
of the laws, and measures will be taken for the general 
safety of each and all of them. 

" (8) The town of Paris and all its inhabitants with- 
out distinction shall be bound to submit on the spot, and 
without any delay, to the King, and to give that Prince 
full and entire liberty, and to assure him and all the 
Royal Family that inviolability and respect to which the 
laws of nature and of nations entitle sovereigns from 
their subjects. Their Imperial and Royal Majesties 
render personally responsible for anything that may 
happen, under peril of their heads, and of military 
execution without hope of pardon, all members of the 
National Assembly as of the Districts, the Municipality, 
the National Guards, the Justices of the Peace, and all 
others whom it may concern. Their aforesaid Majesties 
declare, moreover, on their word and honour as Emperor 
and King, that if the Palace of the Tuilleries be insulted 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 165 

or forced, that if tlie least violence, the least assault, be 
perpetrated against their Majesties, the King, the Queen, 
and the Koyal Family, and if steps be not at once taken 
for their safety, preservation, and liberty, they, their 
Imperial and Royal Majesties, will take an exemplary 
and never-to-be-forgotten vengeance, by giving up the 
town of Paris to military execution and to total subver- 
sion, and the guilty rebels to the deaths they have 
deserved. Their Imperial and Royal Majesties promise, 
on the contrary, to the inhabitants of Paris to use 
their good offices with his Most Christian Majesty to 
obtain pardon for their faults and errors, and to take 
the most vigorous measures to ensure their persons 
and goods if they promptly and exactly obey the above 
command. 

" Finally, since their Majesties can recognise no laws 
in France save those that proceed from the King in full 
liberty, they protest in advance against any declarations 
that may be made in the name of his Most Christian 
Majesty, so long as his sacred person, those of the Queen 
and of the Royal Family, are not really safe, for which 
end their Imperial and Royal Majesties invite and beg his 
Most Christian Majesty to point out to what town in the 
immediate neighbourhood of his frontiers he may judge 
it best to retire with the Queen and the Royal Family, 
under good and sure escort that will be sent him for 
that purpose, in order that his Most Christian Majesty 
may be in all safety to call to him such deputies and 
counsellors as he sees fit, call such councils as may please 
him, see to the re-establishment of order, and arrange 
the administration of his kingdom. 

" Lastly, I engage myself, in my own private name 
and in my aforesaid capacity, to cause the troops under 
my command to observe everywhere a good and exact 
discipline, promising to treat with mildness and modera- 
tion all well-meaning subjects who may show them- 



i66 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

selves peaceful and submissive, and to use force with, 
those only who may be guilty of resistance and of recal- 
citrance. 

" It is for these reasons that I require and exhort, in 
the strongest and most instant fashion, all the inhabitants 
of this kingdom not to oppose themselves to the march 
and operations of the troops under my command, but 
rather to give them on all sides a free entry and all the 
good-will, aid, and assistance that circumstances may 
demand. 

"Given at our headquarters of Coblentz, July 28. 

{Signed) "Charles William Ferdinand, 

Duke of Brunswick- Lunebourg." 

With that weapon the insurrection was certain of all 
Paris. Mandat, who had replaced Lafayette at the head 
of the armed force in the town, was still loyal to the 
King; he organised, as far as was possible, the forces 
that he could count upon. The other side also prepared, 
and the movements had all the appearance of troops 
entrenching themselves before battle. 

Danton went to Arcis and settled an income on his 
mother in case of his death, came back to Paris, and on 
the night of August the 9th the Sections named com- 
missioners to act. They met and formed the " insurrec- 
tionary commune." At eight the next morning they 
dissolved the legal commune, kept Danton, and directed 
the fighting of the morning. 

Meanwhile the King had gathered in the Tuilleries 
about 6000 men, and depended very largely upon the 
thick mass of wooden buildings in the Carrousel for 
cover. The Swiss Guard, whom the decree had re- 
moved, were only as far off as Rueil, and were ordered 
into Paris, over 1500. They were the nucleus, and with 
them some 2000 of the National Guard, 1500 of the 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 167 

old "Constitutional Guards," and a group of "Gentils- 
hommes." Mandat had ordered a battery of the National 
Guard's artillery to keep the Pont Neuf ; they revolted 
and joined the people, and Mandat himself, the chief of 
the defence, was killed on the steps of the Hotel de 
Ville. Danton, who had not slept, but had lain down 
in Desmoulin's flat till midnight, had been to the Hotel 
de Ville since two in the morning, and he took before 
posterity — in his trial — the responsibility of Mandat's 
death. He did more. He acted during the short night 
(a night of calm and great beauty, dark and with stars) 
as the organiser and chief of the insurrection. Especially 
he appoints Santerre to lead the National Guard. On 
these rapid determinations the morning broke, and the 
first hours of the misty day passed in gathering the 
forces. 

Meanwhile all morning the King had waited anxiously 
in the Tuilleries gardens, and asked Roederer, like a 
king in comic opera, " when the revolt would begin." 

All night the tocsin had sounded, but the people 
were slow to gather — " le tocsin ne rend pas " — and it was 
not till the insurrectionary commune had done its work 
that a great mob, partly armed, and in no way disci- 
plined, came into the Carrousel. 

Westermann (riding, as was Santerre) came up to 
parley with the Swiss Guard ; he asked them in German 
(which was his native tongue, for he was an Alsatian) 
to leave the Tuilleries, and promised that if the guard 
retired and left the palace un-garrisoned the people 
would also retire. The Swiss — the only real soldiers in 
Paris — replied that they were under orders, and when 
Westermann retired to the crowd they opened fire. 

Antoinette had said, " Nail me to the Palace," and even 
Louis, timid and uncertain, thought that the chances 
were in his favour. Let only this day succeed, and the 
city could be kept quiet till the allies should arrive ; 



i68 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

that had been the boast in the Koyalist journal of 
August I st ; it was Louis's hope now. 

Had the Carrousel been a little more open, the 
battle might have ended in favour of the garrison, 
but the numerous buildings, on the whole, helped 
the attack, and the Swiss, unable to deploy, fought, 
almost singly, a very unequal fight. There were no 
volleys except the first. Kapid individual firing from 
the doors and windows of the palace, the crowd pressing 
up through the narrowest space (but at a loss of hun- 
dreds of lives), and finally, by the end which gave on the 
" Grande Galerie " the Tuilleries were forced, the garrison 
killed, and only a small detachment of the Swiss Guard 
retreated through the gardens, firing alternate volleys, 
and saving themselves by an admirable discipline. 

But while the issue was still doubtful, Louis and his 
family had gone slowly through the same gardens to the 
Riding-school, and had taken refuge with the Assembly. 
The noise of the fusillade came sharply in at the windows, 
and the event was still uncertain when the Parliament 
received the King and promised him protection. The 
president opened for him a small door at the right of the 
chair, and the King and Queen and their children watched 
the meaningless resolutions through a grating as they sat 
in the little dark box that gave them refuge. The debate, 
I say, lacked meaning, but the battle grew full of meaning 
as they heard it. The shots were less frequent, the noise 
of the mob— the roar — was suddenly muffled in the walls 
of the palace. The crowd had entered it. Then came 
the few sharp volleys of the retreating guard right under 
the windows of the Manege, and finally the firing ceased, 
and the Assembly knew that their oath was of no value, 
and that the Tuilleries had fallen. Louis also knew it, 
eating his grotesque roast chicken in the silent and 
hidden place that was the first of his prisons. He saw 
in the bright light of the hall many of the faces that 



FALL OF THE MONARCHY 169 

were to be tlie rulers of France, but for himself, in his 
silence, he felt all power to be gone. He had become a 
Capet — there was truth in the Kepublican formula. There 
had been played — though few have said it, it should be 
said — a very fine game. The stakes were high and the 
Court party dared them. They played to win all that 
the Kings had possessed, and for this great stake they 
risked a few foolish titles without power. The game was 
even ; it was worth playing, and they had lost. But the 
man who had been their puppet and their figure-head 
hardly knew what had happened. Perhaps the Queen 
alone comprehended, and from that moment found the 
proud silence and the glance that has dignified her end. 
In her the legend of the lilies had found its last ally, but 
now the great shield was broken for ever. 

So perished the French monarchy. Its dim origins 
stretched out and lost themselves in Rome ; it had already 
learnt to speak and recognised its own nature when the 
vaults of the Thermae echoed heavily to the slow foot- 
steps of the Merovingian kings. Look up that vast valley 
of dead men crowned, and you may see the gigantic figure 
of Charlemagne, his brows level and his long white beard 
tangled like an undergrowth, having in his left hand the 
globe and in his right the hilt of an unconquerable sword. 
There also are the short, strong horsemen of the Robertian 
house, half-hidden by their leather shields, and their sons 
before them growing in vestment and majesty, and taking 
on the pomp of the Middle Ages ; Louis VII., all covered 
with iron ; Philip the Conqueror ; Louis IX,, who alone 
is surrounded with light : they stand in a widening inter- 
minable procession, this great crowd of kings ; they loose 
their armour, they take their ermine on, they are accom- 
panied by their captains and their marshals ; at last, in 
their attitude and in their magnificence they sum up in 
themselves the pride and the achievement of the French 
nation. But time has dissipated what it could not 



lyo THE LIFE OF DANTON 

tarnish, and the process of a thousand years has turned 
these mighty figures into unsubstantial things. You 
may see them in the grey end of darkness, like a 
pageant all standing still. You look again, but with the 
growing light and with the wind that rises before morn- 
ing they have disappeared. 



CHAPTER V 

THE REPUBLIC 
August io, 1792 — April 5, 1793 

The I otli of August is not, in tlie history of the Revolu- 
tion, a turning-point or a new departure merely ; it is 
rather a cataclysm, the conditions before and after which 
are absolutely different. You may compare it to the rush 
of the Atlantic, which " in one dreadful day and night " 
swept away the old civilisation in the legend. It is like 
one of the geological " faults " which form the great inland 
escarpments, and to read or to write of it is like standing 
on the edge of Auvergne. You have just passed through 
a volcanic plateau, rising slowly, more and more desolate : 
you find yourself looking down thousands of feet on to the 
great plain of Limagne. 

There is no better test of what the monarchy was than 
the comparison of that which came before with that which 
succeeded its overthrow. There is no continuity. On the 
far side of the insurrection, up to the 9 th of August itself, 
you have armies (notably that of the centre) contented with 
monarchy ; you have a strong garrison at the Tuilleries, the 
ministers, the departments, the mayor of Paris (even) con- 
sulting with the crown. The King and the Girondins are 
opposed, but they are balanced ; Paris is angry and expec- 
tant, but it has expressed nothing — it is one of many 
powers. The moderate men, the Rolands and the rest, 
are the radical wing. It is a triumph for the Revolution 

that the Girondins should be again in nominal control. 

171 



172 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Potion is an idol. The acute friction is between a govern- 
ment of idealists standing at the head of a group of pro- 
fessional bourgeois, and a crown supported by a resurrected 
nobility, expecting succour and strong enough to hazard a 
pitched battle. 

Look around you on the 1 1 th of August and see what 
has happened. Between the two opponents a third has been 
intervened — Paris and its insurrectionary Commune have 
suddenly arisen. The Girondins are almost a reactionary 
party. The Crown and all its scaffolding have suddenly 
disappeared. The Assembly seems something small, the 
ministry has fallen back, and there appears above it one 
man only — Danton, called Minister of Justice, but practi- 
cally the executive itself. A crowd of names which had 
stood for discussion, for the Jacobins, for persistent in- 
effective opposition, appear as masters. In a word, France 
had for the moment a new and terrible pretender to the 
vacant throne, a pretender that usurped it at last — the 
Commune. 

The nine months with which this chapter will deal 
formed the Republic ; it is they that are the introduction 
to the Terror and to the great wars, and from the im- 
prisonment of the King to the fall of the Girondins the 
rapid course of France is set in a narrowing channel 
directly for the Mountain. The Commune, the body 
that conquered in August, is destined to capture every 
position, and, as one guarantee after another breaks 
down, it will attain, with its extreme doctrines and their 
concomitant persecution, to absolute power. 

What was Danton's attitude during this period ? 
It may be summed up as follows : Now that the Revolu- 
tion was finally established, to keep France safe in the 
inevitable danger. He put the nation first ; he did not 
subordinate the theory of the Revolution ; he dismissed 
it. The Revolution had conquered : it was there ; but 
France, which had made it and which proposed to 



THE REPUBLIC 173 

extend tlie principles of self-government to the whole 
world, was herself in the greatest peril. When discus- 
sion had been the method of the Kevolution, Danton 
had been an extremist. He was Parisian and Frondeur 
in 1790 and 1791 ; it was precisely in that time that he 
failed. The tangible thing, the objective to which all 
his mind leaned, appeared with the national danger; 
then he had something to do, and his way of doing it, 
his work in the trade to which he was born, showed him 
to be of a totally different kind from the men above 
whom he showed. I do not believe one could point to 
a single act of his in these three-quarters of a year which 
was not aimed at the national defence. 

It is a point of special moment in the appreciation of 
his politics that Danton was alone in this position. He 
was the only man who acted as one of the innumerable 
peasantry of France would have acted, could fate have 
endowed such a peasant with genius and with knowledge. 
The others to the left and right were soldiers, poets, or 
pedants every one. Heroic pedants and poets who were 
never afraid, but not one of them could forget his theories 
or his vision and take hold of the ropes. Such diplo- 
macy as there is is Danton's ; it is Danton who attempts 
compromise, and it is Danton who persistently recalls the 
debates from personalities to work. It is he who warns 
the Girondins, and it is he who, in the anarchy that fol- 
lowed defeat, produced the necessary dictatorship of the 
Committee. Finally, when the Committee is formed, you 
glance at the names, the actions, and the reports, and you 
see Danton moving as a man who can see moves among 
the blind. He had been once " in himself the Cordeliers " 
— it had no great effect, for there was nothing to do but 
propose rights ; now, after the insurrection, he became "in 
himself the executive," and later " in himself the Com- 
mittee." So much is he the first man in France during 
these few months of his activity, that only by following 



174 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

his actions can you find tlie unity of this confused and 
anarchic period. 

It falls into four very distinct divisions, both from the 
point of view of general history and from that of Danton's 
own life. The first includes the six weeks intervening 
between the loth of August and the meeting of the Con- 
vention ; it is a time almost without authority ; it moves 
round the terrible centre of the massacres. During this 
brief time the executive, barely existent, without courts 
or arms, had him in the Ministry of Justice as their one 
power — a power unfortunately checked by the anarchy 
in Paris. 

The second division stretches from the meeting of the 
Convention to the death of the King. It covers exactly 
four months, from the 20th of September 1792 to the 
2ist of January 1793. It is the time in which the 
danger of invasion seems lifted, and in which Danton in 
the Convention is working publicly to reconcile the two 
parties, and secretly to prevent, if possible, the spread 
of the coalition against France. 

The third opens with the universal war that follows 
the death of Louis, and continues to a date which you 
may fix at the rising of the loth of March, or at the 
defeat of Neerwinden on the 19th. Danton is absent 
with the army during the greater part of these six weeks; 
he returns at their close, and when things were at their 
worst, to create the two great instruments which he 
destined to govern France — the Tribunal and the Com- 
mittee. 

Finally, for two months, from the establishment of 
these to the expulsion of the Girondins on the 2nd of 
June, he is being gradually driven from the attempt at 
conciliation to the necessities of the insurrection. He is 
organising and directing the new Government of the 
Public Safety, and in launching that new body, in im- 
posing that necessary dictator, we shall see him sacrific- 



THE REPUBLIC 175 

ing one by one every minor point in his policy, till at last 
his most persistent attempt — I mean his attempt to save 
the Girondins — fails in its turn. Having so secured an 
irresistible government, and having created the armies, 
the chief moment of his life was past. It remained to 
him to retire, to criticise the excesses of his own creation, 
and to be killed by it. 

Immediately after the insurrection, a week after he 
had taken the oath and made the short vigorous speech 
to the Assembly,^ Danton sent out his first and almost 
his only act as Minister of Justice, the circular of the 
1 8 th of August,^ which was posted to all the tribunals 
in France. It is peculiar rather than important; it is 
the attempt to convince the magistracy and all the courts 
of the justice and necessity of the insurrection, and at the 
same time to leave upon record a declaration of his own 
intentions now that he had reached power. In the first 
attempt he necessarily fails. The old judicature, ap- 
pointed by the Crown and by the moderate ministers, 
largely re-elected by the people, wealthy for the most 
part, conservative by origin and tradition, would in any 
case have rejected such leadership; but the matter is 
unimportant ; this passive body, upon which the reaction 
had counted not a little, and which De Cice had planned 
to use against the Revolution, was destined to disappear 
at the first demand of the new popular powers. France 
for weeks was practically without courts of law. 

Those passages, on the other hand, in which Danton 
makes his own apology are full of interest. They contain 
in a few sentences the outhne of all his domestic policy, 

^ Journal des Debats, 183. 

^ I take this document from Robinet, Domton, Homme d'etat, pp. 109, 
112 ; but neither he nor Aulard (who quotes it) gives the authority. The 
circular is quoted often under the date of August 19 ; it was issued on 
that Sunday, but was drawn up and dated on the Saturday to which I 
have assigned it. 



176 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

and we find in them Danton's memories, his fears of what 
his past reputation might do to hurt him. 

" I came in through the breach of the Tuilleries, 
and you can only find in me the same man who was 
president of the Cordehers. . . . The only object of my 
thoughts has been political and individual liberty, . . . the 
maintenance of the laws, . . . the strict union of all the 
Departments, . . . the splendour of the State, and the 
equality, not of fortune, for that is impossible, but of 
rights and of well-being." 

If we except the puerilities of the new great seal, the 
Hercules with eighty-four stars (to represent the union of 
the Departments), replaced by the conventional Liberty 
and fasces, there is practically nothing more from Danton 
as Minister of Justice. But as the one active man in the 
Cabinet he is the pivot of the whole time. Those 
qualities in him which had so disgusted the men of 
letters were the exterior of a spirit imperatively de- 
manded in Paris at the time. His heavy, rapid walk, 
the coarseness and harshness of his voice, his brutality in 
command, exercised a physical pressure upon the old 
man Koland, the mathematician Monge, and the virtuous 
journalists who accompanied them. I know of but one 
character in that set which could have prevented Danton's 
ascendancy, and have met his ugly strength by a force as 
determined and more refined. Koland's wife might have 
done it, but though she was the soul of the ministry, she 
was hardly a minister, and being a woman, she was con- 
fined to secondary and indirect methods. Her hatred of 
Danton increased to bitterness as she saw him succeed, 
but she could not intervene, and France was saved from 
the beauty and the ideals which might have been the 
syrens of her shipwreck. 

The three weeks following the loth of August were 
filled with the news of the invasion. The King of Prussia 
had hesitated to march. France, full of herself, never 



THE REPUBLIC 177 

understood that such a thing was possible. The kings 
were on the march, the great and simple ideas, so long in 
opposition, had met in battle. All France thought that 
1792 was already 1793. Perhaps there were only two 
men in the country who saw the immaturity, the com- 
plexity, and the chances of the situation — I mean Danton 
and Dumouriez : Dumouriez, because he was by nature a . 
schemer who had seen and was to see the matter from" 
close at hand ; Danton, because, from the first moment of 
his entrance into the ministry, he had gathered up the 
threads of negotiation into his hand. 

The King of Prussia had hesitated, so had Brunswick. 
It was the success of the insurrection that decided them. 
They made the error that the foreigner always makes, 
the error that led the most enlightened Frenchmen to 
exaggerate the liberal forces in England, the error of see- 
ing ourselves in others. They imagined that " the sane 
body of the nation," the Frenchmen that thought like 
Prussians, would rise in defence of the monarchy and in 
aid of the invasion. They had no conception of how 
small in number, how hesitating, and how vile were the 
anti-national party. 

On Sunday the 1 9th the frontier was crossed ; on the 
Thursday Longwy capitulated, and a German garrison 
held the rocky plateau that overlooks the plain of Luxem- 
bourg. A week later, Thursday the 30 th, Verdun was 
surrounded. 

From the hills above the town, the same hills which 
make of Verdun the fifth great entrenched camp of 
modem France, the Prussian batteries bombarded with 
a plunging fire. There may have been food and ammuni- 
tion for two or three more days, but fire had broken out 
in several quarters, and the town council was imploring 
Beaurepaire to surrender. Brunswick proposed a truce 
and terms of capitulation. On the Saturday, the ist of 
September, after a violent discussion, the terms were 



lyS THE LIFE OF DANTON 

rejected, but Beaurepaire knew tliat nothing could save 
the town, and in the night he shot himself. On the 
next day, Sunday the second, Verdun yielded and the 
road to Paris lay open. 

Meanwhile, in the capital itself, a vortex was opening, 
and the poor remnants of public authority and of public 
order were being drawn down into it. The loth of 
August had been a victory into which there entered three 
very dangerous elements. First, it was not final ; it had 
been won against a small local garrison under the menace 
of an invasion, and this invasion was proving itself irre- 
sistible. Secondly, it had left behind it terrors accentu- 
ated by success ; I mean whatever fears of vengeance or 
of the destruction of Paris existed before the insurrection 
were doubled when so much greater cause had been given 
for the " execution " that Brunswick had threatened. 
Finally, the success of the insurrection had of itself 
destroyed the last shadow of executive power, for all 
such power, weak and perishing though it was, had 
centred in the King. 

But besides these clear conditions which the loth of 
August had produced, there was something deeper and 
more dangerous — the fear which fed upon itself and 
became panic, and which ran supported by anger growing 
into madness. There was no news but made it worse, 
no sight in the streets and no rumour but increased the 
intolerable pressure. Trade almost ceased, and the whole 
course of exchange, which is the blood of a great city, 
seemed to have run to the heart. Over the front of the 
Hotel de Ville hung that enormous black flag with the 
letters "Danger" staring from it in white, and in the 
heavy winds another blew out straight and rattled from 
the towers of Notre Dame, Every action savoured of 
nightmare, and suffered from a spirit grotesque, exagger- 
ated, and horrible. The very day after the fight a great 
net had been cast over Paris and drawn in full of royalists. 



THE REPUBLIC 179 

The gates liad been shut suddenly, and every suspect 
arrested by order of the Commune. The prisons were full 
of members of the great conspiracy, for in civil war the 
vanquished appear as traitors. Then there arose a violent 
demand for the trial and punishment of those who had 
called in the foreigner, and a demand as violent, touching 
on miracle, for innumerable volunteers. In every project 
there ran this spirit of madness mixed with inspiration. 

If Paris lost its head, so did the Assembly and the 
Moderates, but in another fashion. Paris was pale with 
the intensity of anger, Roland from a sudden paralysis. 
The fear of Paris was an angry panic ; with the Girondins 
it was the sudden sickness that takes some men at the 
sight of blood. Paris had clamoured for an excess when 
it demanded the trial of the Swiss, who had done nothing 
beyond their mercenary duty ; but the executive met it 
by an excess of weakness when it produced its court of 
ridiculous and just pedants, afraid to condemn, afraid to 
decide. Already the people had learned the secret pay- 
ments of the old civil list,^ the salaries paid to the 
emigrants, the subsidised press. Golier's report had 
appeared but a day before the invasion. 

The news of Longwy was already known. Verdun 
stood in peril, when the acquittal of Montmorin on Friday 
the 3 1 st seemed to be the deciding weakness of the 
government that pushed the populace to their extreme 
of violence. 

He had been governor of Fontainebleau, openly and 
patently a conspirator on the side of the Tuilleries; he 
was not acquitted of this. It was admitted that he had 
" planned civil war ; " he was released by that heroic but 
fatal fault of the Girondins, the fault that later sent them 
to the guillotine, and that now inspired their tribunal — 
they would not bend an inch to compromise with necessity; 
rather than do so they would deliberately aggravate the 

^ Aulard, who quotes from the Moniteur, xii. 445. 



i8o THE LIFE OF DANTON 

worst conditions by inclining against the passions of the 
moment. They seemed to say, " You clamour for mere 
reprisals ; we will show, on the contrary, that we are just, 
and we will even irritate you with mercy." Yet they 
knew that Montmorin deserved death. 

After that decision, and when Osselin the judge took 
with great courage the prisoner's arm in his own and led 
him away, a voice in the court cried out, "You acquit him 
now, and in a fortnight his friends will march into Paris." 
The massacres were certain from that moment; the thing 
had been said which made the small band of murderers 
start out, which made Paris look on immovable, and 
which kept the National Guard silent, refusing to stop 
the carnage. " We will go to the frontier, but we will 
not leave enemies behind us. If the law will not execute 
them, the people will." The damnable spirit which runs 
in colonies and wild places had invaded civilised Europe, 
and the lynching was determined. 

When the Assembly had yielded to the Commune, 
when it was certain that the insurrectionary Commune 
would have its own way, and when it was known that 
Longwy had fallen, that Verdun was surrounded, there 
took place one of those scenes that stand out like 
pictures in the mind, and that interpret the characters 
of history for us better than any accumulation of detail. 

In the garden of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at 
its end, and away from the house, and under the low 
foliage, the six ministers were met in an informal gather- 
ing — rapid, half - silent, a council not predetermined, 
suited to the time ; a few hurried words, whose descrip- 
tion has come down to us by no minute, but by the 
accident of Fabre's presence. Fabre d'Eglantine, the 
uncertain poet, Danton's protege, and dangerous, ill- 
balanced friend,^ stood watching at a little distance. 

^ The scene can be reconstructed from his testimony at the trial of the 
Girondins and from his speech at the Jacobins on the 5th of November. 



THE REPUBLIC i8i 

Roland spoke for all his friends. He was very pale 
and broken-down; he leaned his head against a tree — 
" We must leave Paris." Danton spoke louder, " Where 
do you mean to go ? " " We must go to Blois. We 
must take with us the King and the treasure." So said 
Servan; so said Claviere. Kersaint, whom Danton had 
known at the old Commune in 1791, and who was some- 
thing of Danton's kind, added his word : " I have just 
come from Sedan, and I know there is nothing else to be 
done. Brunswick will be here in Paris within the fort- 
night as surely as the wedge enters when you strike." 
Danton stopped six waverers by a phrase, a phrase of 
just such a character, exaggerated, violent, as his good 
sense made use of so often in the tribune. " My mother 
is seventy years old, and I have brought her to Paris ; I 
brought my children yesterday. If the Prussians are to 
come in, I hope it may be into a Paris burnt down with 
torches." Then he turned round to Roland in person and 
threw out a fatal sentence, necessary, perhaps, but one 
of many that dug the great gulf between him and the 
Girondins. " Take care, Roland, and do not talk too much 
about flight ; the people might hear you." ^ 

I know of no anecdote that tells more about Danton, 
or explains with greater clearness his attitude during the 
crisis that brought on the massacres. For these over- 
vigorous words, fuU of excess, were uttered by a man 
whose character was all for material results — results 
obtained, as a rule, by compromise. This same Danton, 
who talked of " torches " and " Paris en cendres," was 
the only man in France who had the self-control to 
negotiate for the retreat of the Prussians after Valmy. 
His " mother of seventy years " had indeed been brought 
to Paris, but from Arcis, which every one knew to be 
right in the track of the invasion. What we have to 

^ I take all this from Aulard's article in the Revolution Frangaise of 
June 14, 1893. 



i82 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

discover in this speecli, as in every phrase lie uttered, is 
the motive ; for with any other of the great Revolutionaries 
words were the whole of the idea, and sometimes more 
than the idea, but with Danton alone words were the 
means to a tangible end. 

He desired to prevent that fatal breach with Paris 
which he had foreseen to be a risk from the beginning, 
and which Mirabeau in his time had thought so near as 
to be necessary. He was determined to keep this shadow 
— the national executive — in reach of the one thing that 
was alive and vigorous and defending the nation. It is 
of the greatest importance in appreciating his attitude 
to know that he dreaded the Commune. Later, no one 
of the deputies of Paris in the Convention saw as he saw 
the necessity of amalgamation with the Departments. 
Marat he thoroughly despised. Most of the men of the 
Commune had sat in one room with him ; Panis and 
Sergent had even desks under him. He knew them, 
and he contemned them all. He did not know to what 
crimes they were about to commit themselves, or perhaps 
he would have interfered, but he knew they were worth- 
less. 

Behind them, however, he saw Paris, and in Paris he 
ardently believed, in its position and in its necessity. He 
was entirely right. Once let the ministers leave the city, 
and civil war would begin — a civil war waged within 
ten days' march of the enemy, and between what forces ? 
An imbecile, a man like one of our moderns, who thinks 
in maps and numbers, would have said, " Between eighty- 
three departments and one." But Danton knew better. 
He had that appreciation which is common to all the 
masters; he knew the meaning of potential and of the 
word ' quality.' It would have been a fight between the 
members and the brain, and the brain would have died 
fighting, leaving a body dead because the brain had 
died. 



THE REPUBLIC 183 

Thus while the Assembly and the Commune fight 
their sharp battle of the last days of August, while the 
Parliament commands new municipal elections, breaks the 
municipality, then flatters it, then yields and permits it 
to be practically reinforced under the form of a fresh 
vote from the Sections,^ Danton acts as though both 
Parliament and Commune had dropped from the world. 
There are two speeches of his, one of the 28 th of 
August, one of the 2nd of September, and between 
them they mark his attitude and form also the origins 
of that full year of action and rhetoric which define 
him in history. 

In the first, he proposes and carries the measure 
which has been made an excuse for laying upon his 
shoulders the responsibility of the massacres. The speech 
was made for a very different purpose. He authorised 
the domiciliary visits, but his object was to obtain arms. 
One thought only occupied him : to counteract the intense 
individualism of the Moderates, to force despotic measures 
through a Parliament that hated them, and to force these 
measures because without them the situation was lost. 
He got his arms, and just afterwards his mass of volun- 
teers, but the other measure which he had introduced 
to pacify the Commune, the domiciliary visits, have 
marked more deeply in the memories of the time, because 
in the troubled days that followed these visits seemed to 
be a beginning. 

It was Sunday morning, the 2nd of September. Ver- 
dun (though no one knew it yet in Paris) had just fallen ; 
Beaurepaire was dead. The " Comite de Surveillance " 
of the Commune had admitted Marat illegally,^ and for 

^ The votes of the 30th, 31st, and 2nd. 

'^ The word "illegally" is just, for the constitution of the Commune 
and all its acts were legally dependent on the Assembly. On the other 
hand, the Commune had given this committee right to add to its numbers, 
but such men as Marat, who was not a member of the Commune, were 
surely not intended. 



i84 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

a sinister reason. For three days the prisons had been 
marked, and those whom the Comiti^ wished to save 
had been withdrawn; and though the movement was 
spontaneous, though the most of the Sections spoke before 
Marat,-^ yet there was an executive and a directory, and 
that madman was its chief. The moment that the 
massacres were beginning at the Carmes, Danton was 
making the last effort to turn the anger of the moment 
into an enthusiasm for the Champ de Mars and for the 
volunteers. If ever there was an attempt to influence by 
rhetoric a popular emotion which could not be checked, 
and to direct energy from a destructive to a fruitful 
object, it is to be found in this his most famous speech — 
the speech that even the children know to-day in France, 
the closing words of which are engraved upon his 
pedestal. For the only time in his Ufe he turned and 
leant upon the mere power of words : there is something 
in their extraordinary force which savours of despair, and 
they rise at the close to an untranslatable phrase in which 
you hear rhythm for the first and last time in his appeals : 
" De I'audace, encore de I'audace, toujours de I'audace — 
et la France est sauvee." ^ 

He did not wholly fail. When he had rung the great 
bell of the Hotel de Ville and had gone to the Champ de 
Mars, he looked over a great and growing crowd of young 
men running to the enlistment. But for four days — days 
in which he doggedly turned his back to the Commune 
which called him — the killing went on in the prisons. He 
and his volunteers, his silence, were most like this : a man 
in a mutiny on ship-board, in a storm at night, keeping 
the helm, saving what could be saved and careless whether 

^ First La Poissonniere, then the Postes and the Luxembourg, 
2 It is possible that this sentence, including the preceding phrase, " le 
tocsin qui va sonner," &c., are the only part of the speech that has been 
literally reported. The Logotachygraphe was not founded till January, and 
while the Moniteur and the Journal des Debats give much the same ver- 
sion, the latter calls it a "summary." 



THE REPUBLIC 185 

the morning should make him seem a traitor on the one 
hand or a mutineer upon the other. For the tragedy of 
those five days — the days of Sedan — always seems to be 
passing in a thick night. We read records of action at 
this or that hour in the daylight, but we cannot believe 
the sun shone. Maillard, tall and pale in his close black 
serge and belt, is a figure for candles on the Abbaye table 
and for torches in the cloisters and the vaults. There never 
was a horror more germane to darkness. 

But why did Danton not save the prisoners ? I know 
that question is usually answered by saying that he was 
indifferent. So much (it seems to me) survives of a 
legend. For history no longer pretends that he organised or 
directed the crime. Indeed, history finds it daily more diffi- 
cult, as the details accumulate, to fix it upon any one man. 
But the fact that he persistently defended the extremists 
in the following month, that he made himself (for the 
purposes of reunion) an advocate for many men who were 
blameworthy, and tried to reconcile the pure minds of 
the Girondins with such terrible memories — in a word, 
the fact that for months he sacrificed himself in the 
Convention, that he demanded union, has condemned him 
to every suspicion. Que mon nom soit fietri et que la France 
soit libre. 

He might, indeed, have spoken. Popular, the one 
vigorous and healthy personality in the face of Paris, he 
might have bent his energy to the single aim of prevent- 
ing an outbreak. I will not deny that in his mind, over 
which we have seen passionate anger falling suddenly in 
October 1789 and in June 1792, there may have arisen 
some such feeUng as that which restrained the vast mass 
of the Parisians from interfering with the little band of 
murderers — a feeling of violent hatred, a memory of the 
manifesto and a disgust which made the partisans of Bruns- 
wick seem like vermin. There is something of that de- 
plorable temper in the anecdote which Madame Eoland 



i86 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

gives of him, striding through the rooms on the second 
day and saying that the prisoners " could save themselves." 
But this anecdote is not history ; it is an accusation, and 
one made by a partisan and an enemy .^ There is another 
and better reason for his action, which must, I think, have 
made the greater part of his motive. To have spoken 
would have been to play a very heavy stake. If he spoke 
and failed to prevent the rising, he ceased to be Danton. 
His influence fell, he became a Moderate, and himself, the 
one man left to direct affairs, entered the confused ranks 
of opposition — un-Parisian, rejected of either party, while 
France beneath him fell into mere anarchy. 

It would have been gambling with all that he most 
desired : the English neutrality, the union of the coming 
Parliament, the rapid organisation of the armies, all this 
staked to win something that was not precious to him at 
all — the lives of a mass of men the bulk of whom had 
demanded the success of the invasion. 

Why did he not act ? Because nobody could act. 
Remember the phrase which he delivered while Louis 
was being executed four months later : " Nulle puissance 
humaine." ^ We are so accustomed to an aristocratic and 
orderly society that a title of office implies power. The 
Home Secretary or some other man " does this," but the 
man who really does it — does it with his hands — is the 
policeman or the soldier. Now these did not exist at the 
moment in Paris. It explains a hundred things in the 
Revolution to remember that every successive step reduced 
society to powder, to a mere number of men. Rousseau 
had said that this compact, this thing based on voluntary 

^ "Appel k rimpartiale posterity." Madame Roland had the great 
historical gift of intuition, that is, she could minutely describe events 
which never took place. I attach no kind of importance to the passage 
immediately preceding. If Danton and Petion were alone, as she describes 
them, her picture is the picture of a novelist. The phrase quoted above 
may be authentic — there were witnesses. 

2 Moniteur, January 25, 1793. Speech of January 21st. 



THE REPUBLIC 187 

union, was not made for the cities. Paris gave us in 
September an awful proof. Koland, a man whom Marat 
had put upon his list and whom Danton had saved, talked 
on the Monday of the "just anger of the people." Yet 
Roland was a just man, and brave in matters that affected 
himself alone, and the massacres chiefly concerned him. 
He was Minister of the Interior, that is, responsible for 
order, but there was nothing with which to work. On the 
Tuesday he sent to Santerre and said, " Call out the 
National Guard." Santerre answered that he could not 
gather them. He was right. Again, Potion was an 
honest man, a Moderate, the mayor of Paris ; all he could 
do was to sit at a useless committee of the Sections and talk 
of the "National Defence;" that utter disintegration which 
the theories of the Revolution had produced — that purely 
voluntary condition of the soldier, the oflScial, the police 
(a mere anarchy) — was irresistible when there was spon- 
taneity of action; it was useless where the conditions 
demanded organisation and initiative. It withstood the 
cannonade at Valmy, it stormed the height of Jemappes, 
but it fled in rout when the spring had melted enthusiasm. 
So here police, the function that most requires discipline, was 
lacking in the State. And the whole situation is summed 
up in the sharp picture we have of Manuel pushing his 
way though the crowd with " two policemen " who had 
" volunteered," and trying in vain to stop the lynching at 
the Carmes. It was to this anarchy that Danton, after 
six months of struggle, succeeded in giving government 
during 1793. 

Danton himself, after four months of vain effort to 
reconcile his enemies, put the whole matter in the last 
phrase of his defence : " No human power " could have 
stopped the massacres ; ^ all that could be done was to 
work, from that moment forward, against the extreme 

^ Speech of January 21, 1793. 



i88 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

theories of a voluntary state, and towards the establish- 
ment of a strong government.^ 

When, on the Thursday, September 6, the wave re- 
ceded, and when on the morrow Potion was able to 
interfere, the people and the Assembly looked round them 
and saw that a thing had happened which was to hurt 
the future of the Revolution more than all the armies. 
It was like the breaking of day after that moral night, a 
daybreak in which the wind goes down and you see the 
wreckage. 

Paris was very silent ; the accusations had not yet 
begun ; the Assembly was dying. The electoral council 
of Paris had met during the very days of the massacre, 
and had proceeded to choose the members who were to 
represent the capital in the Convention that was about to 
meet. It also voted in silence, and sat in the mingled panic 
and remorse that oppressed the whole city. The names 
came out in the balloting. On the 5 th (the murderers 
were still growling in the streets) Robespierre was elected in 
a small meeting of 525 ; on the 6th Danton was elected 
second, but with a much larger attendance and with a 
much greater majority — 638 votes out of an attendance 
of 700, a curious result. Danton's name forced itself 
upon them, was acclaimed beyond any other ; yet his 
attitude of conciliation, his attempt to have all Paris 
represented, was set aside. The man and his reputation 
succeeded, his policy failed. They elected also Marat, 
Panis, Sergent — those who had directed the crime. Dan- 
ton and Manuel alone of all the twenty-four had any 
touch of the Moderate about them. The long list ends 
with the name of Egalit^, elected by a majority of one.^ 

There came, therefore, into the Convention an ap- 

•^ The accusations against Danton in this matter are given and criticised 
in Appendix IV., where the reasons are also given for omitting any men- 
tion of Marat's circular in the text. 

^ For the figures and very interesting details as to Egalit^'s election see 
Eivolution Prangaise, August 14, 1893, second note, page 129, 



THE REPUBLIC 189 

parently united body of men from Paris — tlie Mountain. 
Up on the benclies of the extreme left, in the grey, dark 
theatre of the Tuilleries, there were to sit, in a compact 
group, these extremists ; and across the floor the Depart- 
ments, the pure Repubhcans of the south, who despised 
the city and them, who feared them terribly, and who 
hated with the force of a religion, were to single them 
out as tyrants. And in this Mountain, this body of 
Eeds, Danton was to find himself imbedded, bound up, 
falsified. He had determined to prevent such parties. 
He had tried hard to make Paris elect not only Robes- 
pierre but Pt'tion also as a mark of unity: he had failed. 
When the country members came up to the capital, 
September had grown to be an avv^ful legend. The 
number of those killed was multiplied ten times,'"' twenty 
times — number lost meaning. Paris seemed a city of 
blood. Guides volunteered story after story. " Here, in 
the Abbaye, the blood had risen so high "—they made 
a mark in the wall ; " there, under that tree, the massacres 
were planned by such and such a one" — any name 
suited, sometimes it was Robespierre, sometimes Danton. 
The deputies came from their little towns and from the 
fields, over seven hundred — pilgrims from places where 
the pure enthusiasms of 1790 still lingered, where even 
1792 had brought no passion. They came, many of 
them for the first time, bewildered in the enormous 
city; its noise confused them, its crowds, its anger — 
" Yes ; that was where the massacres were committed a 
fortnight ago — we can believe it." The Convention from 
its first day seemed a battlefield — Paris defiant in the 
Mountain, and the Departments silent with an angry fear 
in the plain and on the benches of the right. And when 
the newcomers asked to be shown the group of deputies 
for Paris, as men would ask to be shown lurking enemies 

^ More than 700 and less than 1000 died. The common exaggeration 
is Peltier's 12,000. 



I 1 f i 



I90 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

or wild beasts, they would have theu- gaze directed to that 
high place on the left where sat the names that had 
terrified and fascinated them in the prints of their 
country-sides. 

There were no windows ; the skylight, high above 
that deep well of a room, sent an insufficient light down- 
wards upon the foreheads, making the features sharp 
and yet lending them a false gloom. That man with 
the small squat body and the frog's face was Marat ; you 
could just see his great vain mouth in the dim light. 
Those small, keen features, well barbered and set up, the 
high forehead, the pointed bones of the cheek and chin, 
stood for Robespierre. The light fell chiefly on the white 
of his careful wig ; his thin smile was in shadow. And 
who was that huge figure, made larger by the darkness 
and carrying a head like Mirabeau ? They saw it moving 
when the others were fixed. He would speak to his 
neighbours with heavy, sweeping gestures. They grew 
accustomed to the half-light, and they could distinguish 
his face — the strong jaw, the powerful movement of the 
lips, torn and misshapen though they were; the rough, 
pitted skin, the small, direct, and deep-set eyes. Who 
was he ? He seemed to them the very incarnation of 
all the bloodshed and unreason which they hated in 
Paris, a master of anarchy. It was Danton. 

Against that impression all policy and wisdom broke. 
He demanded unity ; he checked the growing attack on 
the rich ; he said things that were like France speaking. 
But the voice was harsh and loud ; they heard it in their 
minds at the head of mobs ; they fled from him to the 
Girondins ; they forced him back upon the Mountain, and 
he had to do his work alone in spite of those orators 
whom he would have befriended and whose genius he 
loved — in spite of those madmen who surrounded him, 
and who later killed him and the Republic with one 
axe. 



THE REPUBLIC 191 

It was on the 2 5tli of September, a Thursday, that 
the Convention met in the Tuilleries ; on the Friday, in 
the same place, with doors shut and with the galleries 
empty, they declared the Kepublic, and moved off to the 
Manege, where their predecessors had sat. In those two 
days the violent quarrel between Paris and France was 
hushed for a moment. Danton, in the lull, said all he 
could to define his own position and to prevent that 
quarrel from ever reaching a head. He went out to 
meet the Moderates. He declared, with the common 
sense of the peasant, that property must first be declared 
inviolable; and it is curious that the Convention, the 
majority that misunderstood him and broke with him, 
was yet less moderate than he ; it passed the resolution, 
but in the form, " property is under the safeguard of the 
nation." In order to calm opinion he resigned the 
Ministry of Justice on the spot; ^ he did everything to 
make his position clear and true, and to save the unity 
of the Parliament. 

But the attack came from the others. Within a 
week Lasource had proposed a guard for the Convention, 
" drawn from the departments ; " and in the face of this 
proposition, that was almost civil war, Danton found 
himself able to speak once more for unity. The Girondins 
had elected one of themselves for president, and had 
chosen from among their own members the secretaries of 
the Assembly; they had wittingly ostracised the left, and 
they desired to make it dumb. Danton still attempted 
union. " I myself come from the Departments, from a 
place to which I always turn my eyes. But Paris is 
made of the Departments, and we are not here as members 
of this place or that, but as members for France." He 
continually presented the idea of France united ; the 

^ As a fact, his successor, Garat, was not elected till the 9th of October, 
and did not begin to act till the 12th. Danton seems to have remained at 
the Ministry till the evening of the nth. 



192 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Girondins as continually rejected it. He knew that they 
thought him a shield for Marat; he rejected Marat openly 
from the tribune. But all this intense and personal 
action had but an effect upon individuals. Two especially 
it moved— Vergniaud, the young orator, sincere and brave 
beyond all his colleagues, and more far-seeing than any 
of the dreamers around him ; Condorcet, to whom a year 
before Danton had seemed so repulsive, but whose calm 
and just mind had arrived at the truth; who had said, 
" Danton has that rare faculty of neither hating nor envy- 
ing genius in others ; " who had voted and spoken for his 
appointment as Minister of Justice, and who, up to the 
catastrophe of the following June, continued to under- 
stand and to support him. 

But, for the mass of the Girondins, he remained an 
outcast. He used words that one could not use before 
Roland's wife, and the great group that surrounded her 
(men over-full of Utopias, but heroic, men whom Danton 
himself regretted bitterly) made him an outcast. He 
replied often with passion, and once with insult, but as 
we shall see he did not abandon them entirely till the 
insurrection destroyed them in '93. 

Meanwhile, while they voted the Republic in Paris, 
under Argonne a battle among the most curious in 
history was making a momentary secmity— that is, a 
momentary union of good feeling throughout France, 
and even in Paris itself. The Prussian army had been 
checked on the little rise of Valmy. As you stand upon 
the field in that same season of the year to-day, in the 
mist of the early morning, as the volunteers and the 
battered remnants of the line stood then; as you look 
from that standpoint at the open road, at the great plain 
of Champagne, so well suited to maintain an army; as 
you see to the east the long wall of the Argonne, and 
remember that Dumouriez had been outflanked in his 
Thermopylae, a confusion seizes the mind. Why on earth 



THE REPUBLIC 193 

was Valmy so important a victory ? It is a common-place 
to say tliat Yalmy was a cannonade, but what was a 
cannonade in 1792? If indeed to-day a line of guns 
were drawn up and served, as I have seen them served in 
the mancEUvres within sight of these same hills, and if a 
force should be discovered capable of withstanding the 
shrapnel of twelve batteries of artillery, sure of their 
range, turning the mark into a ploughed field — then that 
force would merit peculiar names, for it would be im- 
mortal. But in the eighteenth century guns were not 
the arbiters of battles. Infantry could charge the bat- 
teries then. France, which was crushed yesterday and 
will succeed to-morrow solely through artillery, had not 
a hundred years ago to dread the random solid shot of 
smooth bores ; what she had to dread was the bayonet 
charge of that superb infantry which the great Frederick 
had trained, and on which the monstrous scaffolding of 
Prussia stiU reposes. All we can say of Valmy is this, 
that men quite ignorant of warfare, badly held together, 
managed to stand firm under an ill-directed, at times 
a desultory and distant cannon fire. 

Valmy was not a victory. The results of Valmy 
have changed the world, but no one could have seen it 
then. Goethe, in the course of a long life, discovered it, ^ 
and put it beautifully into his own mouth over one of 
the bivouac fires : " We entered on a new world then ; " 
but there were better prophets than Goethe, and not one 
perceived it. For days the Prussian army hesitated. 
Dumouriez did not dare to meet them, A pitched battle 
in the last days of September might have changed all 
history. 

Why then did the King of Prussia retreat ? "No 
force compelled, but two arguments convinced him. The 
peasantry, and Danton, the man who through the whole 
year is, as it were, a peasant trained and illumined. The 
resistance of the peasantry had taught the King that to 

N 



194 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

reacli Paris it required not a war of the d3rQasties. such, 
as had filled the eighteenth century — wars in "which 
armies passed like visiting caravans; the invasion of 
France would need a crusade. He was no crusader. 
He had undertaken the war with only half a heart, 
and at this slight check he hesitated. The second 
argument came from Danton. He bargained like a 
peasant secretly for the purchasable and obvious good, 
while the Parliament was talking as might talk a 
conqueror who was something of a poet and well 
read in the classics. When there was a talk of 
negotiations just after the battle, it launched the great 
words, " That the Republic does not discuss till its terri- 
tory is evacuated." That was on Tuesday ; the Republic 
was young to discuss anything — it was four days old. On 
Wednesday night, Westermann, Danton's man of the 
loth of August, and his companion at the scaffold, 
started off secretly to diplomatise. That foolish man 
D'Eglantine followed him, but his folly was swallowed up 
in the wisdom of Danton, who sent him, a secretary and 
a mouthpiece, to do that which, had he done it himself, 
would have produced some violent and ill-considered vote. 
Between them this clique settled the matter, and the 
invaders passed back through the Argonne heavily, in 
wet roads and through drenched woods, with Kellermann 
following, impatient, above the valleys, but bound by 
Danton's policy not to harass the retreat; till at last, 
more than a month after Valmy,-^ he fired the salute 
from Longwy, and the territory was free. 

Did Danton know, as he was pursuing these plans, 
why Dumouriez helped him ? Did he understand thor- 
oughly that vain, talented, and unprincipled soldier ? I 
think it certain. It is among those things which cannot 
be proved ; one does not base such convictions upon docu- 
ments, but rather on the general appreciation of character. 
1 October 23. 



THE REPUBLIC 195 

Thus Danton undoubtedly helped and used Talleyrand 
at another time in England, and Talleyrand was patently 
false. But Talleyrand was, as patently, the cleverest 
diplomatist he could find. Dumouriez wished the King 
of Prussia to be left unmolested for a number of very 
mixed reasons, in which patriotism played a small part ; 
Danton wished it for the sake of France, and for that 
only ; but if Dumouriez at the head of an army was to 
hand, so much the better. Danton supported Dumouriez, 
his policy, even his retreats up to the disaster of March. 
To say " he sympathised with a traitor " is one of those 
follies which men can only make when they forget that 
contemporaries cannot have known what we know. With 
all his time-serving and his separate plans, no one dreamt 
that in six months the general would join the Austrians ; 
it was a sudden blow even to those who sat in his tent. 

October was a month of reconciliation. When the 
man broad awake succeeds, the dreamer is ready to build 
a new dream on that result. The Gironde was almost 
silent, the Mountain was afraid. In the short visit that 
Dumouriez paid, between a victory and a victory, to Paris, 
Danton appears for a moment a partner in the mental 
ease, the brilliant expression, and the Republican faith of 
the Girondins. He might perhaps have ended there, and 
with his great arms and shoulders have held apart the men 
whose mutual hatred killed the Republic. In his success 
— and every one bore him gratitude after Valmy — that 
which he most desired almost happened, and the alliance 
between the opposing Girondist and the Mountain was 
half realised. 

Michelet gives us two pictures -^ which, like the reve- 
lation of lightning, show us that rapid drama standing 
still. In the first it is Madame Roland, in the second 
Marat, who makes the tragedy. In the first Dumouriez 
and Danton sat in the same box at the theatre, and 

^ Michelet, ist edition, vol. iv. pp. 392-394. 



196 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Vergniaud was coming in witli tlie soul of tlie Girondins. 
The door opened and promised this spectacle : Danton 
and the general and the orator of the pure Republicans, 
and the woman most identified with the Right. It would 
have been such a picture for all the people there as Dan- 
ton would have prayed or paid for. The door was ajar, 
and, as she came near, Madame Roland saw Danton sitting 
in the box; she put out her hand from Vergniaud's 
arm and shut the door. There is in her memoirs a kind 
of apology, "des femmes de mauvaise tournure." Utter 
nonsense ; it was Roland's box, and his wife was expected. 
Danton and Dumouriez were not of the gutter. No, it 
was the narrow feminine hatred, so closely allied to her 
intense devotion, that made Madame Roland thrust Dan- 
ton at arm's length. The same spirit that made her 
vilify the Left like a fury made her the calm saint of the 
Girondins. For she lived entirely in the Idea. 

The second scene is a reception. I will not repeat 
Michelet's description ; its spirit is contained in an admir- 
able phrase : " France civilised appealed therein agaiast 
France political." Danton was surrounded with those 
whom he would have taught, as he taught all who ever 
knew him closely, to respect or to love him. Marat 
heard that he was there — Marat, whom he had repudiated 
in public a few days before. He heard that Danton was 
there, surrounded by the soldiers, and the women, and 
the orators. He called at the door, and shouted in the 
hall, " I want to see Danton," and at the sound of his 
voice everybody grew troubled, and Danton was left 
alone. On the 29 th of October Danton attempted 
openly to break with Marat : " I declare to you and to 
France," he said in the Convention, " that I have tried 
Marat's temperament, and I am no friend of his." But 
the attempt came too late. 

The discussions broke out again in November. On 
the loth, the victory of Jemappes was heard in Paris. 



THE REPUBLIC 197 

This book, dealing only with a man, cannot detail those 
famous charges; it was a victory won by men singing 
the new songs ; it is the inspiration of " La victoire en 
chantant," But the security it gave only went further 
to destroy what was left of union. Danton found him- 
self more and more alone. He who had been named on 
a committee with Thomas Paine, with Condorcet, with 
Potion, on the very day after his election to the presidency 
of the Jacobins,^ who had in his own temporary success 
seemed to realise his policy of union, found himself after 
a month once more pushed back towards the Mountain. 
The growing sense of security had destroyed the chances 
of union. He remained silent. One would say that the 
time passed him by untouched, because the one thing he 
cared for had failed, and because the inevitable civil dis- 
sensions of the next spring covered his mind with clouds. 
France was irretrievably divided. The arraignment of 
the King, the discovery of the secret papers, all the 
movement of November leaves him, as it were, stranded, 
waiting his mission to Belgium. 

There belongs to this period only one considerable 
speech. It is the only thing in all his public acts in 
which you can discover beauty. You may find in this 
speech the pity and the tenderness which his intimates 
loved, the memory which they for sixty years defended, 
but which no document or letter remains to perpetuate. 

Cambon, careless of anything but his exchequer, had 
thought the new era come. That cold and inflexible 
head determined, seeing the steep fall towards bankruptcy 
that France was making, to save a hundred millions, 
but to save it at an expense. He proposed to separate 
the State from what was left of the Church, to break 
the vow of 1790. In almost the last speech before he 
went off to the armies, Danton opposed him and gave 
this passage — a passage better fitted to the defence of 

^ October lo and 1 1. 



198 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

an older and stronger thing than the wretched constitu- 
tional priesthood : — 

"... It is treason against the nation to take away 
its dreams. For my part, I admit I have known but 
one God. The God of all the world and of justice. The 
man in the fields adds to this conception that of a man 
who works, whom he makes sacred because his youth, 
his manhood, and his old age owe to the priest their 
little moments of happiness. When a man is poor and 
wretched, his soul grows tender, and he clings especially 
to whatever seems majestic : leave him his illusions — 
teach him if you will . . . but do not let the poor fear 
that they may lose the one thing that binds them to 
earth, since wealth cannot bind them." 

Before he left on the mission to the armies there 
occurred a scene which has always been, since Michelet de- 
scribed it, the most striking passage of his relations with 
the Girondins. He, the man who saw safety for France 
only in diplomacy, had, for the sake of unity, held his 
tongue when the Girondins passed the decree of the 
19th November, which was to sustain a revolutionary 
crusade against Europe. I say that November is full 
of Danton's attempt to maintain the unity of the Parlia- 
ment. After all these efforts he was worsted, because 
the Girondins were possessed by a dream which admitted 
of no compromise and of no realities. 

The scene of his last attempt was this : — He made a 
rendezvous with their party. They were to meet secretly 
at night and away from Paris in a house in the woods of 
Sceaux at the very end of November. The whole life 
of this man was a tragedy, and we see in this sad journey 
that kind of dramatic presentiment of his death and of 
theirs, the " foreknowledge " with which the tragedies 
of the world are filled. 

He went through the desolate bare woods of Novem- 
ber, under the hurrying sky, that recalls to our minds 



{THE REPUBLIC 199 

in France to-day the charges of Jemappes. The night 
was as wUd as the time, and as dark as his forebodings, 
when he came on to the Httle group of men in the 
candlehght, and argued with them, and against them, 
and alone. Michelet gives to Danton's mind a senti- 
ment of coercion. He shows us Danton dragged by 
necessity. But I can see no necessity except the supreme 
desire to unite the parties and make the government real. 
They would not receive his alliance, and he went away 
from that meeting at midnight, pushed back upon Paris, 
thrown into the comradeship of violence. Guadet re- 
jected him with an especial fervour. Danton as he left 
turned upon him with this phrase: "Guadet, Guadet, 
you cannot understand and you do not know how to 
forgive ; you are headstrong, and it will be your doom." 
The next day he started on his mission to the army. 

During the arraignment and during the trial of the 
King the opinions that divided the Left and the Right 
fought it out in his absence.^ He was not there to 
attempt such a movement as his character demanded. 
No one in all the Assembly dared hold out a hand as 
he would have done and see whether after all Vergniaud 
might not perhaps be right on the one hand, and the 
Mountain perhaps be patriots on the other. 

There was in this debate upon one man's life an 
element to which Danton's nature was well suited. 
There had to be kept in view for the French nation the 
effect upon Europe which would follow from the determi- 
nation as to the death or life of the King, and Danton's 
great voice has so strongly and so rightly affected the 
historians of the period that he thrusts his personality 
forward into their narrative, and in at least one notable 
place Danton appears, in history, and in one of the greatest 

^ He made a speech on the 6th of November demanding (of course) the 
trial of the King, but not with violence. He left for Belgium with Dela- 
croix on the I St of December. 



200 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

pages of history, by no riglit, and figures upon scenes whicli 
do not possess the advantage of his voice. He has been 
made to defend Louis's hfe, to plead for a respite, and then 
by a violent change to vote for his death. 

Let me now explain how this error passed into the 
mind of Michelet and of other men. Danton returned 
from Belgium on the night of the 14th January. On 
that same day a certain Dannon, apparently an honest 
man,^ rose late in the evening and demanded respite for 
Louis. When Gallois reprinted the Moniteur, he saw this 
obscure name coupled with a politic demand ; he read it 
again, and said, " This Dannon must be a misprint for 
Danton." He corrected it so. On this chance venture 
there fell the eye of Michelet, the eye that from a glance 
or a word could bring back the colours and the move- 
ments of living men. In him also the tragedy of Danton 
powerfully worked ; he moulded a figure from these few 
words in the Moniteur, and made of them an admirable 
anti-climax. Here was Danton (Dannon) hot from the 
armies, knowing in what peril France stood, having seen 
with his own eyes how momentary had been the effects 
of Jemappes. He comes from his travelling coach to 
the Assembly, and with the mud of the road yet upon 
him, gives his expression as an ally to the Girondins and 
to the Moderates. Then some rebuff, some unrecorded 
insult throws him back again as he had been so often 
thrown back into the arms of the Extremists. On the 
next day, the 1 5 th of January, we are asked to watch him 
sitting by the side of his dying wife, sullen and despairing. 
On the 1 6th he comes back furious, and votes for the death 
of the King. 

1 This Dannon was a friend of Danton's. He began, but did not com- 
plete, a collection of his speeches, &c., and an inquiry into his accounts. 
He was a member for Pas de Calais. It is not easy to get his name 
accurately spelt. I follow the spelling of a list of the Convention pub- 
lished in 1 794. Dannon voted for banishment. 



THE REPUBLIC 201 

There are those for wliom detail in history is pedantic, 
yet here upon three letters and their order hangs the 
interpretation not only of an individual character but 
of a policy whose effects we are still feeling. Michelet's 
great picture is false from beginning to end. Danton had 
returned on the 14th, and came jaded with his journey to 
the bedside of her who had been his young wife of five 
years, who was now near to childbirth and to death. He 
had his own drama as well as that of the historian's, and 
our own dramas are acted upon a stage where the results 
are real. All that night of the 14 th and all the 15 th 
he was watching in his flat of the Passage du Commerce 
a fate which was coming upon him, and certainly for 
whose thirty-six hours the Revolution was a little thing 
to him. He came back wearily to his position and to his 
duties on the 1 6th; he remembered there was such a thing 
as the Revolution — that Louis was after all on trial, and 
descended from his home into the hall of the Parliament to 
give the short angry sentence in which we seem to read less 
moderation and less of diplomacy than was his by nature. 
The scene in the home had made him not only bitter but 
weak, for there is surely weakness in saying, " I am not a 
statesman," in borrowing, that is, the vulgar acrimony of 
Marat, or in talking of " the tyrant," and in repeating the 
phrases of the Mountain. 

But in the days that followed Michelet finds a good 
excuse. Certainly one would say, if one knew nothing 
about him except his action of January 1793, that Danton 
was the Mountain and nothing else. This error would be 
supported by the unreasoning vehemence, the almost 
brutal anger, into which he allows himself to fall. 

They asked whether the King could be condemned to 
death by a mere majority, and whether that majority was 
decisive. Danton threw back at them : " You decided 
the Republic by a mere majority, you changed the whole 
history of the nation by a mere majority, and now you 



202 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

think the hfe of one man too great for a mere majority ; 
you say such a vote could not be decisive enough to make 
blood flow. When I was on the frontier the blood flowed 
decisively enough." 

So naturally was he at that moment the Danton of 
imreason, so much had his character yielded to its persis- 
tent temptation of violent words, that there could be heard 
a voice once calling out to him as he rushed to the 
tribune without leave from the Speaker, " You are not a 
king yet, Danton." And yet this was the man who had 
saved France from any folly of defiance after Valmy, who 
was determined upon saving her in the future by keeping 
upon the helm a quiet and unswerving hand. Vergniaud's 
great simile, " That France might become, if she did not 
take care, like the statues of Egypt ; they astonish by their 
greatness, and yet are enigmas to all who see them, because 
the living spirit that made them has died," passed him by 
without effect. He was one of those who voted in the 
fatal majority, and he threw down as gage of battle the 
head of a king.^ 

The word had become reality, and Louis had stood at 
mid-day trying to be heard beyond the ring of soldiers, 
had cried out that he was innocent, and had died in the 
noon of that cold January day. This act was destined to 
produce the one thing that Danton had most ardently 
desired to avoid — it put an end once and for all to the 
neutrality of England. 

Another people, then in their infancy, now old, whom 
Louis had been persuaded to help against his will, re- 
ceived the death of Louis like a kind of blow in the face. 
The people of the United States in their simplicity had 
imagined the French king to be their saviour ; they did 

^ I mnst not omit to mention one phrase which is far more character- 
istic of him — that spoken after Lepelletier's assassination : "It would be 
well for us if we could die like that." 



THE REPUBLIC 203 

not know Louis's phrase, " I was dragged into that un- 
happy affair of America; advantage was taken of my 
youth," They regarded his crown with a certain super- 
stition, as they still regard what is left of baubles in 
Europe ; and when the axe fell upon him, France lost 
not only the calculating hypocrisy of Pitt, but the genuine 
sympathy of the American people. 

In the days that followed (they were only ten) between 
the 2 1 st of January and the end of the month, it is still 
plain that the shock which most affected Danton's vigor- 
ous and independent judgment was that return after seven 
weeks to the wife whom he had passionately loved, and 
whom this ugly Orpheus felt slipping from his arms back 
into the shades. After her death, as we shall see, he did 
not reel so heavily, but in that fortnight of January, which 
was of such supreme importance, he permitted misfortune 
to rouse mere passion in his mind; and he who might 
have led the Moderates, who might have played with the 
life of Louis like a card, chose to remember his rebuff in 
the winter and threw his trump away. 

Many have tried to explain Vergniaud's vote. Is it 
not probable that he was drawn by the example of a man 
whom he did not understand, and whose opinion attracted 
an orator not unappreciative of energy ? Vergniaud has 
always before history a doubting and a hesitating face, 
and it seems more than possible that the wrath of Danton 
carried him and many others into the vote for death. 

Ever since the loth of August had thrust him into 
unexpected power, Danton had held in one way or another 
the threads of a certain diplomacy. It was as follows : — 
To rely upon all the elements in Europe which admired 
or were indifferent to the Kevolution, and to combine them 
in a kind of resistant body ; to use, as it were, their inertia 
against those who were setting out as crusaders against 
France. On this account the foolish war of propaganda 
was most distasteful to him. On this account England's 



204 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

neutrality haunted his mind. He knew that in this 
country there existed a body strong in its influence 
though not in its numbers, a body which would have 
supported the French. Priestley had written to him be- 
fore his exile. Talleyrand was working for him at the 
moment, and opposing as an informal Dantonist the 
Girondin acerbity of Chauvelin.-^ Danton was even willing 
to use Dumouriez, mainly because Dumouriez was about 
to compromise with England. To this policy of observa- 
tion, a policy which took advantage of England as the 
lover of individual liberty and of England as the mer- 
chant, the death of the King put a sudden stop. It was 
Danton that killed his own intrigue. 

Before he left on his second mission to the armies on 
the 31st January 1793, he shows that new face in which 
he attempts to retrieve, as far as possible, the errors of 
which he had been largely the author. In a speech 
which shows once again all his old power of party politi- 
cal action, he demands the annexation of Belgium. He 
has seen that general war is inevitable, and harking back 
again to that unique French conception of which he was 
the heir, the raison d'etat, he determines to save the State, 
and to do it by an action which opposed every theory of 
the Revolution. He asked " everything of their reason, 
nothing of their enthusiasm," and he demanded the 
annexation of Belgium with France. It was pure oppor- 
tunism — the determination to get hold of a revenue by 
force of arms ; and the next day, after having painfully 
come back to his old policy of the real and objective, 
burdened by a past error, and having broken with all that 
he valued in French opinion, he went off again to the 

^ The proofs of the connection with Talleyrand are based only on infer- 
ence. They will be found discussed in Robinet's Danton Emigri, pp, 1 2- 
i6 and pp. 270, &c. As for Priestley's correspondence, it was sympathetic 
and deep, and continued in spite of the massacres of September. There 
is a draft of a Constitution in the French archives which some believe to 
be Priestley's, but I am confident it is not in his handwriting. 



THE REPUBLIC 205 

army. While his chaise was yet roUing on the flat roads 
of Flanders, Chauvelin returned with Pitt's scrawl in his 
hand, and France was at war with the whole world. 

This next voyage to Belgium occupied but a very 
short time. He did not get there until the 3rd February, 
and he started to come back on the 1 5 th. But the 
moment, which is necessarily a silent one in his biography, 
would be one of capital importance to us had he remained 
in Paris to speak, and to leave us by his speeches some 
clue as to the revolution through which his mind had 
passed. 

Consider these contrasting pictures : Danton, up to 
the death of the King, seems uniquely occupied in pur- 
suing the threads of a very careful diplomacy, and in 
welding as far as possible the opposing factions of the 
Parliament. Of course, his general theories in politics 
remain unaltered, but something has happened which 
makes him, on returning from Belgium for the second 
time, pursue this different policy: the immediate con- 
struction of a strong central government, and the provid- 
ing of it with exceptional and terrible machinery. He 
works this as absolutely the unique policy. He seems to 
have forgotten all questions of diplomacy, nearly to have 
despaired of settling the quarrel between Paris and the 
Girondins. In fine, Danton, when first in power, had 
been a man so representative of France as to have many 
different objects, and to attempt their co-ordination. We 
see him the brief fortnight of Louis's execution violent, 
angry, unreasoning; we see him again in less than a 
month transformed into a man with a single object, pur- 
sued and succeeded in with the tenacity common to 
minds much narrower than his own. 

I know that events will largely account for the change. 
The Girondins had repelled him; diplomacy had no further 
object when once the universal war was declared; the 
grave perils, and later the disasters of the French armies, 



2o6 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

which he had seen with his own eyes, called imperatively 
for a dictatorship. Nevertheless events will not of them- 
selves account for the very great transformation in all 
that he says and does. I believe that we must look to 
another cause — one of those causes which historians 
neglect, but which in the lives of individuals are of far 
more importance than their political surroundings. By 
nature he had great tendencies to indolence as well as 
to violence. He was capable of temporising to a danger- 
ous extent, and this, I think, was largely the cause of his 
•action in the autumn. But such natures are also of the 
kind which disaster spurs to action. As we have seen, the 
return in January to his household, ruined by an impend- 
ing fate, made him the violent and bitter speaker who 
spoiled his own plans by his own speeches. But returning 
from Belgium in February, not a menace but a definite 
disaster awoke in him a much more useful energy. 

Coming from fields in which he had seen the whole 
force of the early battles breaking up in confusion and 
retreat, he had suddenly to meet the news of his wife's 
death. He bought a light carriage for himself in order 
to travel with greater speed, and arrived at the city in 
time, they say, to have her cofiin taken out of the grave 
and opened, so that he might look once more upon her 
face. The home was entirely empty. The two little chil- 
dren, one of whom was in arms, the other of whom was 
just begianing to talk, had been taken away to their grand- 
mother's. The seals were on the furniture and on the 
doors. One servant only remained. The house had been 
without a fire for a week when he entered. It was an oppor- 
tunity and a command for another origin in his political 
life. Coming and going from these rooms, he found them 
intolerable ; he took refuge in direct and determined 
action, calling to his aid all that vast reserve of energy 
which he was accustomed to expend at the cost of so 
much future exhaustion. 



THE REPUBLIC 207 

Here was the first thing to be done — to construct at 
once tliat strong and simple government which he had 
talked of so long. The report which he and the other 
commissioners had prepared on the state of the army-^ 
was one deliberately intended to make such a government 
voted. The Commune of Paris immediately after the 
preparation of the report made its vigorous appeal for a 
further levy, and on the 8 th of March Danton made the 
first of those speeches which riveted the armour all round 
France.^ 

In the first phrase of this speech he strikes the note 
upon which depended so much of his power. He reads 
his own character into that of the nation. " We have 
often discovered before now that this is the temper of 
the French people — namely, that it needs dangers to 
discover all its energy." Then he strikes the other note, 
the appeal to Paris which had marked so much of his 
career. " Paris, which has been given so ill a fame " (a 
stroke at the Girondins), " I say is called once more to 
give France the impulse which last year produced all 
our triumphs. We promised the army in Belgium 30,000 
men on the ist of February. None have reached them. 
And I demand that commissioners be named to raise a 
force in the forty-eight Sections of Paris." 

If there was some talk at that moment of making 
him Minister of War after Beurnonville's resignation, it 
was because no one but Danton himself understood 
how much his energy could do. He rejected the pro- 
posal, but he had the desire to replace the ministers 
themselves by a power more formidable and more direct. 

In these days one disaster after another came to help 
his scheme. More than one of his enemies had suspected 
in a vague fashion that he was framing a new power,^ but 
they could not imagine in Danton anything higher than 

^ Monitev/r, March 9, 1793. ^ Tbid. March 10, 1793. 

* See Patriate Frangais, No. 1308. 



2o8 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

ambition, and they lent him the ridiculous project of 
forcing a new ministry upon the Assembly. What he 
was really preparing, and what he produced on the loth 
of March, was the weapon which history has called the 
Revolutionary Tribunal. 

It was the moment when the mutterings against the 
Girondins seemed about to take the form of an insur- 
rection,, when their printing presses were broken, and 
when, in the vague panic that always followed any popular 
movement since September, men feared a renewal of the 
massacres. The proposal is put forward with ability of 
argument rather than with passion ; but, in the teeth of 
the majority and a ministry to which such methods were 
detestable, in the teeth, that is, of the Girondin idealism 
which was ruining the country, he affirmed the necessity 
of his scheme, and he passed it.^ He had given the 
Revolutionary Government its first great weapon, a weapon 
that was later to be turned against himself; his second 
move was to put it into vigorous hands. 

This next proposition, which, combined with the esta- 
blishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal, was to change 
the history of France, did not proceed from Danton alone, 
but it was based upon Danton's suggestion; it sprang 
largely from the vivid impression he had given of the 
peril in which France lay and of the necessity of forming 
something central and strong, of providing a hand which 
could use the dictatorship of the Terror. The Committee 
of Public Safety, in a word, could not have been declared 
but for the interpretation which Danton had given to the 
disasters of March. 

The crowning defeat of Neerwinden, which at the 
time must almost have seemed the death of the Republic, 
gave the first impulse. The old Committee of General 
Defence was renewed. But though this committee was 
far too large and far too feeble, we owe it to Danton that 

^ See Moniteur, March 13, 1793. 



THE REPUBLIC 209 

it contained a vigorous minority from tlie Left. The 
final blow that replaced it by an institution round which 
the rest of this book will turn was the treason of 
Dumouriez. 

Let us consider what the situation was at this moment. 
The Kepublic had lost every man upon whose ability she 
could rely iu the leadership of armies. Of all the school 
of generals who had grown up under the old regime, 
Lafayette alone in his weak way had loved freedom, and 
Dumouriez alone had remained on the side of the French. 
Spain, England, the German Powers — nine allies — were 
threatening the territory of the Republic and the very 
existence of the new regime; the civil war, which was 
soon to take such gigantic proportions, had already made 
its successful beginning at Machecoul. Between the 
Convention and immediate disaster there lay only the 
personality of Dumouriez. When the news of his deser- 
tion, following on the news of his defeat, reached Paris, 
the Girondins were hopelessly discredited, and the line of 
their political retreat, the pursuit of their enemies, ran in 
a direction that Danton's speeches had prepared. 

For several days he had himseK been the object of 
the most violent attacks, especially for his friendship with 
Dumouriez and on the question of the Belgian accounts. 
For he had just returned from a third mission to the 
army, and had been close to the general. On the ist 
of April practically the whole sitting was devoted to an 
attack upon him and to his defence. Had you been 
sitting in the house that night, you would have said that 
a violent demagogue, surrounded by a little group of yet 
more violent friends, was resisting with some difficulty 
the attacks of an honest and loyal majority. But this 
demagogue was so far-seeing, was so much the greatest 
of all those in the hall, that when three days afterwards 
the Parliament was brought face to face with the reality, 
Danton's method becomes the only solution. They hear 



2IO THE LIFE OF DANTON 

of Dumouriez' treason, and on tlie night of the 4tli of 
April, Isnard, himself a Girondin, proposed the creation of 
the Committee. Danton supported him at midnight with 
a definite speech such as no Girondin would have dared 
to make. He said practically, " This Committee is pre- 
cisely what we want, a hand to grasp the weapon of the 
Kevolutionary Tribunal." 

It was Isnard that formulated the idea, but it was 
Danton that baptised it " A Dictator." It was at midnight 
that he spoke, and he closed his short speech just on the 
turn of the morning of the 5 th of April. That very day a 
year later the Dictator seized him, and his own Tribunal 
put him to death. 

On the 5 th of April, the next day, in the evening, we 
begin to get those large measures and rapid which came 
with the new organ of power. And Danton speaks with 
a kind of joy, and demands at once such measures as 
only a dictatorship can produce — calling all the people to 
the defence, fixing a maximum upon the price of bread, 
even the first mention of a levee en masse. The air is 
full of such a spirit as you get in an army, yae certitude 
that with discipline and unity and authority all things can 
be done. On the following day, the 6th, the Com.mittee 
was chosen, and on the 7th the names were read out, 
which showed that the power had finally passed from the 
Girondins to those whom they had rejected at the moment 
when France was forgiving everything for the sake of 
Jemappes. The Convention, in need of men of action, 
had been forced to abandon its own leaders and to turn 
to Danton. 

The names that they heard read out were Barr^re, 
Delmas, Br^ard, Debry, Morvaux, Cambon, Treilhard, La- 
croix, and Danton. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE TERROR 

From the 6tli April 1793, from the act which was de- 
scribed at the end of the last chapter, we have something 
new in the course of the Revolution. We have at last an 
Institution. 

It is in the nature of the French people (for reasons 
which might to some extent be determined, but whose 
discussion has no place in this book) that their history 
should present itself in a peculiarly dramatic fashion. 
Their adventures, their illusions, their violence, their de- 
spair, their achievements, seem upon a hundred occasions 
to centre round particular men or certain conspicuous 
actions, in such a fashion that those men and these actions 
fit themselves into a story, the plot and interest of which 
absorb the reader. But if we attempt to connect the 
whole into a series, even if we attempt to give the causes 
or the meaning of a few years' events, the dramatic aspect 
fails. This quality, which has fascinated so many, has 
also mistaught us and confused us, and, in the desire to 
"throw the limelight" upon the centre of action, one 
historian after another has left in obscurity that imper- 
sonal blind force which directs the whole. 

This force in France is the Institution. Understand 
the character and methods of her central power, and you 
find yourself possessed of this great key to the under- 
standing of her history, namely, that events follow each 
other in the order that the Institution requires, and the 
nation moves along the lines which the Institution deter- 



212 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

mines. The Institution provides a standpoint from wliicli 
all falls into perspective, even the details of personality no 
longer remain in confusion. You find, in a little while, 
that you are dealing with an organism more simple and 
of far greater vitahty than any man, as truly a living, and 
much more truly a permanent, force than a monarch or a 
great minister can be. 

The consideration of half-a-dozen examples will make 
this clear. What is all that marvellously dramatic action 
between Pepin le Bref and the coronation of Hugh but 
confusion ? It ceases to be so when we follow with Fustel 
de Coulanges the transformation of the Imperial system. 
You can make nothing of the tenth and eleventh centuries, 
for all their personal interest, until you have grasped Feu- 
dalism, and it is a common-place that the six hundred 
years that follow are but the development of the Capetian 
method. It is not in Louis the XI., or in Mazarin, or in 
Louis XIV. that we find the Force — it is in the French 
monarchy. Look about you at the present day, ask your- 
self what has recreated the prosperity of modern France, 
and you will certainly not be able to find a special man. 
It is the System that has done the work. 

Now it is the note of all the Kevolution, as we have 
followed it up to this point, that the Institution was lack- 
ing. France without it was France without herself : she 
dissolved. The cause of this lack was as foUoAvs : The 
monarchy, round which everything had centred, was dying, 
and the social theories of the time — the great Philosophy 
on which France was fed — neglected and despised the 
Institution, relying as it did upon the vague force of 
general opinion. It was the chief — I had almost said the 
only — fault of the Jeffersonians in America and the idealist 
Republicans in France, that they could see neither the 
necessity of formulae nor the just power of systems. Never- 
theless it was the instinct which remained in the French 
mind, the " sub-conscious " sense of what the Institution 



THE TERROR 213 

was to France, that made half the violence of the time. I 
do not mean that the speeches recognised this character 
openly — on the contrary, the enmities and the divisions 
seem to turn entirely upon personal hatreds ; but I mean 
that the underl3dng fear, unexpressed but real, was that 
such and such a proposition would create a permanent 
tendency, and that Girondin or Jacobin success meant the 
deflection of the torrent into one or the other of two 
divergent channels. Here in England, living under an 
order which is well established and old, we wonder at the 
intensity of passion which some abstract resolution could 
arouse in the Convention. We should wonder no longer 
were we to comprehend that in the extreme rapidity with 
which all France was being remoulded, a few words agreed 
upon, a mere principle, might add a quality to all the 
future history of the nation. 

Two men in the Revolutionary period rose higher 
than the flood, Mirabeau and Danton. Each was able 
to perceive what the permanent character of the nation 
was, and each gave all his eflbrts to the uniting or weld- 
ing round some stable centre the new order to which 
both were attached. In a word, each understood what 
the Institution was to France, and desired to lend it 
force and endurance. With Mirabeau it was the monarchy. 
Would he have saved, recreated, and restored that de- 
clining power which had once been the framework of the 
nation ? We cannot tell. Had he lived, '92 would have 
shown us; only we know that if the monarchy had 
seemed to him at last beyond repair, he would have 
proposed at once some similar power to replace it. Now 
Danton had survived ; doubtful in 1 791, "more monarchist 
than you, M. de Lafayette," he was determined in 1792 
that the crown and France were separate for ever. He 
overthrew the palace, but from that very moment all his 
policy was directed to the construction of a governing 
power. It is here that he and the Gironduis, for all his 



214 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

personal attempts at unity, were hopelessly divided. The 
Girondins were bent upon that local autonomy and that 
extreme individual liberty in which the central power 
disappears. With the growing danger, with his own 
experience of Belgium, Danton, during the early part of 
1793, becomes set upon the idea of government and of 
nothing else. He gave it a weapon before it existed, for 
he made the Revolutionary Tribunal, and though Isnard 
first proposed it, it is known that Danton led the move- 
ment which ended in the establishment of the Com- 
mittee. 

All government since that time in France has been 
its heir. It was the Committee that forged the central- 
ised system, that showed how the administration might 
radiate from Paris, that gave precedent for the conscrip- 
tion and for all determined action. That dictatorship so 
plainly saved the country in its worst peril that under 
many different names the French people have often re- 
called it, and rarely without success. 

All the remaining year with which this chapter must 
deal is the story of the Committee. The Committee 
explains and gives us the clue to every action. Its 
changes, the men who dominated it, the reasons it had 
for violence or for clemency, its main object of throwing 
back the invasions — these are the central part of 1793 
and 1794. 

Had we an accurate account of what passed in that 
secret council, almost every event could be referred to it. 
But such an account is lacking. Barrere, always incon- 
sistent, wrote a rigmarole in his old age which has 
anecdotes of interest, but which is almost valueless for 
our purpose. Here and there we have a disconnected 
anecdote or a lame confession, but the doors of the room 
are as closed to us as they were to the contemporaries 
who stood in the outer hall and received the official 
nothings of Barr(^re, or later of St. Just. Nevertheless 



THE TERROR 215 

what we can reconstruct of its spirit and action, im- 
perfect as our effort may be, does more to explain the 
time than any descriptions of the orators or of the 
crowd. 

The action of this new executive, as it touches Danton, 
changes rapidly during the year. In the first Committee 
of nine Danton is everything. He made it and he directs 
it. Towards the close, however, of its short existence, he 
is beginning to feel the pressure of the Jacobins, and of 
Kobespierre and of St. Just, the victory of the Mountain. 
This loss of power on his part ends with the dissolution 
of the old Committee, and when the new one is formed — ■ 
with the loth of July — another period begins. The 
members are increased to twelve ; then enter the Robes- 
pierrians. Danton, for motives which we shall discuss 
later, resigns, and there are two doubtful summer months 
when he still maintains, from without, the power of the 
Committee, but first begins to check so far as is possible 
the tyranny upon which it has embarked. He retires 
in a kind of despair to Arcis, and with his return a new 
phase is entered. The Committee is striking furiously; 
the Terror has taken root ; and by an action of generosity, 
or perhaps of wisdom, Danton sets himself against his 
own creation. These few months — the winter of 1793— 
1 794 — give us that side of Danton which at the time was 
least explicable, but which best defines him for posterity. 
He puts his whole weight as an orator, and, through the 
genius of his friends, he puts the journals also against the 
Terror. Knowing (as he must have known) how strong 
was the engine he had made, he yet withstands it, and 
attempts by a purely personal force, without an organisa- 
tion and without executive power, to reduce the action 
of the Committee. So great was he that for some weeks 
his success hung in the balance. France, we must pre- 
sume, was with him. Paris doubted, but might have 



2i6 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

been won. When the violent and unscrupulous Hebertists 
were executed he seemed to have succeeded, and the 
Terror appeared to be closed. But the Committee had 
a deeper policy; in the same week that saw the fall of 
Hubert, Danton was himself suddenly arrested with his 
friends. How far Kobespierre permitted and how far 
directed the action will never be fully known. The 
Committee struck the one great force opposed to it, and 
the Dantonists were executed on the anniversary of its 
creation. 

The first part of the story of the Committee in its 
relation to Danton is the period between April the 6th 
and July the loth 1793. It is the period of the fall of 
the Girondins ; and to make clear the importance of the 
new power I shall adopt this method : — 

To give first in their order the events that led to the 
attack on the Parliament and the expulsion of the twenty- 
two ; to show in what confusion the whole story lies, and 
how diflicult (or impossible) it is to follow the motives 
of the deputies, or to say why they acted as they did. 
Then to give, as a parallel account, the position and 
action of the Committee, and to show how fully (in my 
opinion) its motive determines the history of the time ; 
to look at the insurrection of June 2 from the room 
where the nine members debated in secret, and to point 
out how, from that standpoint (which was Danton's own), 
the confusion falls into order. 

First, then, what was the exterior history of the move- 
ment that destroyed the Gironde ? It will be remem- 
bered that when the Convention first met in September, 
the great majority of its numbers inclined to a certain 
spirit. That spirit was best represented by a small group 
of men, idealists and orators — and of these a number, 
the most powerful perhaps, had come from the vineyards 
of the peaceable southern river. The warmth, the calm, 



THE TERROR 217 

tlie fruitfulness of the Valley of the Gironde, appeared 
in Vergniaud's accents. To this devoted band of men, 
whose whole career was justice and virtue, no one has 
dared to be contemptuous, and history on every side has 
left them heroes. They were own brothers to the im- 
mortal group that framed the American Constitution, 
the true heirs of Rousseau, and worthy to defend and 
at last to give their lives for the Republican idea. They 
hated the shedding of blood; they tested every action 
by the purest standard of their creed ; and from the first 
speeches in which they demanded the war, to the day 
when they sang the Marseillaise on the scaffold, they did 
not swerve an inch from the path which they had set 
before themselves. 

What led such men! into conflict with Paris, and per- 
haps with France ? This fault : that the pure theory which 
they justly maintained to be the one right government 
could not meet Europe in arms. What a few millions lost 
on the littoral of the American continent could do, without 
frontiers and without memories, that France could not 
do with civil war raging, and with the world invading 
her frontiers. A modification was imperative, a com- 
promise with necessary evil. The men who felt reality 
knew that well. Danton had forced on a dictatorship, 
and gave it the method of the Terror. But the Girondins, 
though they had been compelled to give up so much, yet 
refused to follow the necessary path. They refused the 
conscription ; a volunteer army was the only one tolerable 
to free men. They refused diplomacy ; it involved a secret 
method, and was of its nature based on compromise. 
They refused the requisitions to the armies, the forced 
taxes, the hegemony of Paris, the preponderance of 
talent or genius in the committees — in a word, they 
refused to sanction anything, however necessary, in that 
crisis, which they would not have sanctioned in a time 
of order and of a pure republic. 



2i8 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

The result of this sublime obstinacy was the ruin 
of France and of themselves. The Koyalists saw it, and 
called themselves " Girondins ; " the great name became 
a label for every reaction, and in every new disaster Paris 
saw with increasing clearness the restraining hand of the 
Gironde. For it was Paris and its Commune that took 
the leadership in the attempt to depose or expel the men 
who led the Parliament. Already before the Committee 
had been formed, the Commune on April the 2nd had 
begun to correspond with the municipalities of France — 
the fatal step that had so often preceded insurrection. 
To Paris as a centre, to Paris radical, and especially to 
Paris violent and unreasoning, the Girondins had grown 
detestable. Paris for a thousand years had stood for unity 
— the Girondins were autonomist and federal. Paris was 
passionate — the Girondins as calm as light. To all this 
enmity the Gironde answered by no force, but only by 
an assertion of their inviolable right. All April and May 
is consumed in the tale of great disasters without, and 
of the acute battle between the Eight and the deputa- 
tion from Paris within. 

It is when we turn to this struggle within the Con- 
vention that the confusion arises which can only be made 
clear by considering the Committee. Especially is this 
the case with regard to Danton's action. Thus, on the 
loth of April, he opposes the prosecution of those who 
sent a petition from the Halle aux Bles for the resigna- 
tion of Roland ; on the 1 3 th there is the famous speech 
in favour of diplomatic action as opposed to the violence 
of the Mountain. Yet the day before he also opposed in a 
formal and well-reasoned speech the arrest and trial of 
Marat. When that madman, with whom his name had 
been so often linked, came back in triumph from his 
acquittal, Danton took a yet more inexplicable attitude. 
While all the Mountain were shouting for joy, and while 
Paris welcomed the verdict as the first wound of the 



THE TERROR 219 

Gironde (which, indeed, it was), Danton merely said, 
" Paris, we see, so loves the Convention as to applaud 
the acquittal of one of its members " — a very trans- 
parent speech. On the ist of May Danton is the only 
man to speak with sobriety and good sense against the 
petition of the Faubourg St. Antoine, which attacked 
the rights of property ; yet on the i oth he turns against 
Isnard, that is, against the Gironde and the Moderates, 
and causes the proposal of what was practically a popular 
referendum on the constitution to be rejected. We see, 
therefore, even when we look at the action of Danton 
alone, the apparent confusion that was indicated above. 
Were we to turn to almost any other of the Committee 
the same would be apparent. Barrere, the chief spokes- 
man, seems to take now one side, now the other. At one 
moment he attacks the Girondins purposely ; at another 
the petitions from Paris ; at every point, in the action 
of every prominent speaker outside the two opposing 
groups, there appears this inextricable tangle. 

With the I oth of May the battle between Paris and 
the Gironde entered into its last phase. It was upon this 
date that the Convention began to sit permanently in 
the little theatre of the Tuilleries, where they had first 
met. The news that met them was the death of Dampierre 
and the taking of Thenars by the Vendeans. Every 
rumour of disaster (and the rumours were being confirmed 
with fatal rapidity) was like oil spilt from the lamp of 
the Gironde. Their own followers were shaken, the great 
mass of the Convention who put their trust in these pure 
doctrines grew afraid and doubtful. Within a week (on 
the 1 7 th) the Commune took a further step ; they made 
their own law, and put Boulanger at the head of the 
armed force of the town — a force that was not theirs to 
govern. Later they gave Henriot the place. The Con- 
vention answered by electing Isnard their president ; and 
Guadet, the headstrong, proposed to break the Commune, 



220 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

and to call the "suppliants" to Bourges. By this pro- 
posal a kind of Parliament in reserve would have existed 
to take up the work if the Parliament in Paris should be 
mutilated. Had the motion passed, the civil war, which 
was muttering in Lyons and had broken into open flame 
in Vendue, would have embraced all France. 

But at this juncture Danton's Committee comes in 
again with its curiously mixed action. By the mouth of 
Barr^re it pleads against the motion, and proposes instead 
the appointment of twelve members, as Girondin as they 
pleased, to judge the Commune, to " inquire." The com- 
mission was named, and acted on thorough principle and 
with haste, and without judgment, as any one might have 
foretold ; for such was the Girondin weakness. Against the 
army that the Commune was gathering, all it could pro- 
pose was to double the sergeant's guard at the Tuilleries, 
while it exasperated its enemy by ordering the arrest of 
Hebert. 

Hebert was the one man in the Revolution of whom 
the truth has certainly been told by enemies. There was 
something of the pickpocket in Hebert, but not of the 
pickpocket only. He was also a blasphemer, an atheist, 
a man delighting in the foulest words, and in the most 
cowardly or ferocious of actions. His prominence was 
due to two things. First, he was the pamphleteer of the 
time, the " Pere Duchesne." France had not yet disco- 
vered the danger of a free press. Secondly, in the 
Parisian exasperation against " the Moderates," the most 
extreme and the least rational became of necessity a 
kind of symbol, an accentuated type, and was thrust 
forward as a defiance. It is not too much to say that 
the Girondins themselves, by their lack of all measure, 
pushed Hubert to the front. 

Such measures as those which "the twelve" had 
decreed were but fuel for the insurrectionary flame. 
Once more Danton appears, this time against the Gironde. 



THE TERROR 221 

To tlie demand for a large guard drawn from the Depart- 
ments lie said, " You are decreeing tliat you are afraid ! " 
Whereupon a voice from the right cried with some humour, 
" I am." Danton had his way, the guard was not formed, 
and on the following day (the 25 th of May) Isnard's 
imprudence brought on the catastrophe. 

It was in the matter of the petition for the release of 
Hubert. Isnard rose in the chair, lifted his hand, and pro- 
nounced in his hollow voice the words that have enriched 
history at the expense of his country : " If such a thing 
should happen as an attempt upon the representatives of 
the nation, I say to you, in the name of all France, that 
very soon men would search upon the banks of the Seine 
for proofs that Paris had once been there." Danton 
intervened, but he could do nothing. The glove had 
been thrown down. He asked for the withdrawal of 
those words; the Girondin majority reaffirmed them. 
Two days later he obtained the freedom of Hubert ; but 
though for a moment he was promised the dissolution of 
the " Commission of the Twelve," his effort failed, for 
they were immediately reinstated. In the night between 
the 30th and the 3 ist of May the Sections named a new 
and insurrectionary Commune ; for one day the danger 
was warded off, and you may see Danton, still so difficult 
to understand, urging the Committee, while Barrere is pro- 
posing the conciliatory message to France, a document 
which blamed neither the Girondins nor Paris, and the 
twelve were dissolved. But the final blow was not to 
be avoided. On the 2nd of June the news of the counter- 
revolution in Lyons reached Paris. The Convention was 
surrounded ; Henriot, at the head of the city militia, 
guarded its approaches, lined the corridors. Even in 
that moment, when Isnard proposed to retire, and made 
his superb apology, the Gironde, as a whole, stood firm. 
The inflexible Jansenist, Lanjuinais, proposed, with heroic 
folly, " a decree dissolving the authorities of Paris," at a 



222 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

moment wlien tliese very authorities were holding the 
doors with fixed bayonets; but in spite of Barrere's de- 
mand for Henriot's condemnation, in spite of Danton's 
demand for " a signal punishment," the Convention 
yielded, voted the arrest not only of the twenty^ two, 
whom the Commune had demanded, but of twenty-nine, 
and Vergniaud, Barbaroux, Guadet; Le Brun, and Clavifere 
(who were nominally ministers); Roland (who had fled, 
and whose wife was imprisoned by the Commune) — in 
fine, the whole body of those great orators who had made 
the Republic — were thrust out of the Assembly, some to 
be held in the honourable confinement of their own 
houses, some to fly and raise civil war in the Depart- 
ments. The Commune offered hostages in equal number, 
but they were refused ; and before the day was over the 
Parliament was mutilated, and the obstacle to the dicta- 
torship and to the Terror had been swept away. 

Such is a rapid summary of the fall of the Giron- 
dins — a story of contradictions and of inextricable cross- 
purposes, in which for two months men seem (especially 
the men of the new Committee) to change sides, to 
hesitate, and to falter, in which the majority passes over 
to the Jacobins with a startling rapidity, and in which 
(apparently) the only two fixed points are the immov- 
able figures of the Gironde and their opponents of the 
Commune. 

I know that this confusion has commonly led writers 
to adopt an equal confusion in their explanation of the 
insurrection and of its motives. To disentangle such a 
skein it was apparently necessary to make Robespierre a 
prophet, Isnard for once a coward, Barrere a skilful diplo- 
matist, Danton a vacillator. Such a method appears to 
me false. If, to explain a difficult passage in history, we 
make men behave in a way which contradicts all their 
lives, we must (it seems to me) be in error. These special 
theories are mechanical, and do not satisfy the mind. 



THE TERROR 223 

The question is this : Somewhere a power existed ; 
why was not that power in evidence either on one side 
or on the other ? And why do we not see it acting ? I 
beHeve the answer is as follows : — 

The power was in the Committee. The Commit- 
tee believed it necessary to be rid of the Girondins. 
But the Committee was part of the Convention — the 
existence and the authority of the Convention was neces- 
sary to it. It saw on the one hand a set of Parliamentary 
leaders who would not permit it to act with vigour, on the 
other it noted the angry spirit of Paris. The Committee 
permitted that spirit to act, but gave it its measure and 
its direction unknown to itself, desiring to eliminate the 
Moderates, but anxious to avoid their proscription, exile, or 
death. With this clue the maze seems to me resolved. 
It was the Committee that expelled the Gironde, using 
Paris for its arm. 

Now to prove this certain steps are necessary. In 
the first place, why can we say that the Committee was 
the centre of power ? Because it alone had access to a 
complete knowledge of France, it alone debated in secret, 
and it alone existed for the express purpose of dictator- 
ship. When once the generals, the deputies in mission, 
and the police became familiar with the new organ, they 
referred to the Committee as naturally as the correspond- 
ing men to-day would refer to a cabinet or to a monarch. 
If the reader will glance at any portion of the document 
which is printed as Appendix XI. of this book, and to which 
I shall continually refer in this passage, he will at once 
perceive that the men who drew it up had in their hands 
every lever of public machinery. I would not maintain 
that this power sprang at once into existence on the 6th 
of April, but the two months that produced such a report 
was ample time to have developed a corresponding grasp 
upon the armies, upon the diplomacy, and upon the 
internal resources of Revolutionary France. Where else 



224 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

will you find such a document in all the offices of the 
time ? Compared with it the decisions of the ministry 
are vague abstractions, the reports of the Commune 
puerilities or ravings. Revolutionary France, until the 
formation of the Committee, may be compared to a marsh 
in which the water tends to flow to no one centre ; the 
information, the revenue, the public forces stood incoherent 
and stagnant. The creation of this secret body may be 
compared to a pit dug in its centre, to which the waters 
would immediately flow. It may be objected that they 
had not the control of finance. No ; but they had 
Cambon. In an assembly of men new to government 
this very difficult province fell of itself into the hands of 
a man whose genius all admitted, and whose probity 
no one of his enemies would deny. Long before the 
insurrection took place, any man with information, with 
authority, or with a special duty to perform, had learnt 
to regard the Committee as his chief, for the simple reason 
that no other centre of authority existed. Add to this 
the incalculable force of secrecy, the power by which the 
most glaring failures of our cabinets can be hidden by 
merely saying, "We know what all the rest ignore," and 
it will appear reasonable to say that by June the Com- 
mittee could almost, had it wished, have summoned an 
army to Paris. The Committee then held the power. 

In the second place, we must establish, as far as is 
possible, the aims of the Committee and their method of 
guiding the insurrection. As was said earlier in this 
chapter, those aims and methods can only be arrived at 
by inference ; the very nature of a body that deliberates 
in secret makes this method of inquiry necessary. There 
is no direct evidence, unless the contradictory anecdotes 
of a much later period can be given that name. Now 
we can infer with some accuracy what went on in their 
deliberations. There should be noted at the- outset the 
document to which I have already referred, and which, if 



THE TERROR 225 

I am not mistaken, is printed for tlie first time in this 
book. It was the first of those general Kapports which were 
dehvered by Barrere to the Convention for the next six- 
teen months, and which so profoundly affected the course 
of the Revolution. It sums up the result of two months 
of astonishing labour; everything — all the weakness of 
France — has been noted with the accuracy of a topo- 
graphical survey. It gives the equipment, the provision- 
ing, the local difficulties of each army, the detailed 
condition of the fleet (a most deplorable picture), the 
result of what is evidently an elaborate spy-system in the 
department of foreign intrigue, and everywhere the indict- 
ment is obvious — " whatever has governed France hitherto 
has hopelessly failed." There are, indeed, polite refer- 
ences to the ineptitude of the old regime, but side by 
side with these there is a direct attack on the Girondin 
Ministers of War, and on the diplomatic, or rather non- 
diplomatic, methods which had been pursued abroad ; 
indeed, many parts of this report would not be out of 
place had they appeared in a Compte Rendu drawn up 
by the victorious insurrection, instead of preceding, as 
they did, the faU of the Gironde. 

Again, there is the date of its appearance. It was 
not by a coincidence that Barrere was given it to read on 
the 29th of May. Note this sequence. Isnard made 
his fatal speech on Saturday the 25 th. Monday the 
27th was the date of Danton's attempt to dissolve "the 
twelve;" and his failure followed on Tuesday the 28th, 
when, by the blindness or firmness of the Gironde, they 
were reinstated. It is on Wednesday the 29 th that 
Barrere rises at the end of a long and stormy discussion, 
and, late in the afternoon, presents his report. The vague 
phrases on the importance of unity which it contains have 
made some imagine that it was an attempt at conciliation, 
rapidly devised and thrown out at that critical moment. 
That opinion is surely erroneous. It is long (some 1 7,000 

p 



226 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

words) and carefully prepared ; it must liave taken some 
time to draw up, and it lias all the appearance of a 
weapon framed at leisure and held in reserve ; it comes 
at that moment with some such force as this, saying 
from the Committee, from Danton, to the Gironde — " You 
have refused to do what France absolutely needed. You 
have rejected my attempts to save you, the avenues 
which I opened for your escape; you were given the 
commission of twelve ; you have fatally abused the gift. 
Will you be convinced at the last moment by this 
picture of the terrible straits to which you have brought 
the nation ? " 

Finally, we can draw a fairly conclusive set of proofs 
from our knowledge of the men in the Committee and 
of the public action they took. Of all the nine, Danton 
was the one commanding personality. Cambon was a 
specialist, and but for him and Lindet, honest but not an 
orator, there were Danton and his men only. Barrere, 
it may be urged, was not a Dantonist ; but he was 
pliant to a degree; his pliancy is notorious, and has 
ignorantly been given a still worse name. Moreover, 
Barrere was closeted with Danton day after day; they 
undertook the same department in the Committee (that 
of foreign affairs), and they follow exactly the same 
course in the tribune. In the Department of War was 
Delacroix, Danton's friend and right hand. Of the report 
itself, all the last part, and possibly some paragraphs in 
the middle, were drawn up by Danton. Later we shall 
see that his preponderance was notorious and a danger 
to him. 

Well, Danton and the Committee being so nearly 
identical, can we make a description of the motive that 
urged him ? I think we can. Desmoulin's " Histoire des 
Brissottins" was certainly not of Danton's inspiration. 
Camille wrote that deadly pamphlet under the eye of 
Robespierre. But Fabre d'Eglantine at the Jacobins, on 



THE TERROR 227 

May tte ist, calling on the Girondins "to go, and return 
when all is settled," is almost using Danton's own phrase 
— " Qu'ils s'en aillent, et qu'ils revennent profiter de notre 
victoire." All that he and Barr^re say, from then to the 
day of June the 2nd, seems to fall under this formula. He 
permits the attack of the Commune, while he does every- 
thing to moderate its force. He speaks continually for 
the defence, but he and his Committee refuse to act, and 
if ever he has spoken a little too strongly, has given the 
Girondins a little too much power, he retreats somewhat 
towards the Commune. He resembles a man who is 
opening a sluice in a dyke of the fen country: behind 
him is the sea ; he admits and plays with its power, but 
unless his calculation is just it may rush in and over- 
whelm him. He permitted Paris to strike, and he created 
a tyranny ; both the mob of the capital and the dictator- 
ship were destined to break from his hands. 

These are, as I read them, the causes of the fall of 
the Girondins. I have dealt with them at this length 
because the passage from the 3 ist of May to the 2nd of 
June 1793 is not only one of the most fiercely debated, 
but also one of the most important in the history of the 
Revolution. I have not given it too much space, for upon 
the understanding of what led to and what permitted the 
insurrection depends, without any question, our final judg- 
ment on Danton's position. 

Here, then, the Committee, even in its infancy, 
furnishes the clue to a difficult passage in the Revolution. 
It is becoming more and more necessary as research pro- 
gresses to refer the mysteries of the period to that central 
body ; and, as it seems to me, we have in its first general 
report the first explanation of that most complex move- 
ment, the insurrection of the 2nd of June. 

The Gironde having disappeared, there was left before 
Danton a task of extreme difficulty. He was about to 
attempt the management of men whom he deliberately 



228 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

permitted to engage in battle. It is of the very first 
importance in our study of his career to appreciate the 
conditions of this task. Consider for a moment what he 
has done. He has by arguments, by threats, and finally 
by the use of the mob, made the Kevolutionary Govern- 
ment a reality. It is in this last ally that we find the 
cause of his future failure. Hitherto he has been battling 
with particular men, preventing a small group of politi- 
cians from obstructing the Revolutionary measures, cajoling 
on the other hand the extreme members of the Conven- 
tion by calculated outbursts of sympathy. Such a task no 
one would find impossible, did he possess at once a clear 
object and the genius to approach it. But after the 2nd 
of June it was another matter. He had let loose the 
storm, and with the pride of a man who felt his strength 
inwards and outwards (for scheming and for haranguing), 
he had determined deliberately to ride it. It was a mis- 
calculation. Something resembling a natural force, some- 
thing like an earthquake or a lava stream, opposed itself 
to his mere individual will ; and Danton, who among the 
politicians had been like a man among boys, became in 
the presence of these new forces like a lonely traveller 
struggling at evening against a growing tempest in the 
mountains. From this moment we shall see him using 
in vain against the passions of 1793 the ability, the ruse, 
the eloquence, the energy which had so long succeeded 
among the statesmen. They will be swept down like 
driftwood upon the current of popular madness which he 
himself has let loose. The Committee will be formed of 
new members, the Terror will grow from day to day, the 
Revolution will begin to take on that character of fanati- 
cism which was directly opposed to Danton's plan, and he 
will retire disappointed and beaten. He will return 
frankly out of sympathy with the excesses, and in expia- 
tion of that fault of sanity he will die. 

The months in which he fights this losing battle are 



THE TERROR 229 

tlie hot months of 1793. I will not deny that during 
this summer his name is more conspicuous than at any 
period of his hfe. I will admit that if we deal with 
history as a spectacle, the climax of 1793 should be dis- 
tinguished by his voice and presence. But it is this 
fascination of the picturesque which has made his life 
inexplicable, and a biographer dares not leave it so. 
Although June, July, and August are full of his speeches, 
his warning, and even his energy, yet I say that he 
was day after day losing his hold and slipping. He 
is conspicuous because in the face of such disaster he 
redoubled his energy ; but even that redoubled energy is 
dwarfed in the face of the spirit that animated the Terror. 

First with regard to June : it was still a period of 
hope, and he still thought himself the master. He had 
added to the Committee, not thinking them dangerous, 
but as a kind of sop, five members of the Mountain. 
Among them were two who were to prove the ruin of his 
whole system — Couthon and St. Just. Perhaps to tem- 
per their action, perhaps merely because he was a friend, 
he included H^rault de Sechelles. The names were 
typical of what was to happen in 1794, when, by the 
power of St. Just, H^rault was to be thrust out of the 
Committee and sent to die with Danton himself. 

Unconscious of what this addition would lead to, un- 
conscious also of what echoes the 2nd of June might 
arouse in the provinces, Danton pursued his path as 
though the insurrection had been but one event of many. 
The minister Le Brun was brought by his guards day 
after day to aid in the discussions, and taken back to the 
custody of his own house. One might have thought that 
the " moral insurrection " of which Robespierre had talked 
had led only to a " moral suppression " of the Girondins. 
Moreover, the whole of these days of June are full of 
Danton's yet remaining supremacy. He goes on with his 
two principal methods, namely, a strong secret govern- 



230 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

ment and moderation in the application of its tyranny, 
as tlaough the situation was his to mould at his will. 
ThuSj on the 8 th, he says with regard to the decree 
against foreigners : " I will show you such and such an 
alien established in France who is much more of a patriot 
than many Frenchmen. I say to you, therefore, that 
while the principle of watching foreigners is good, you 
should send this proposal to the Committee and let it be 
discussed there." Again, two days later, he refuses to 
admit the violent attitude of the Mountain towards Bor- 
deaux. He even praises that city at a time when it was 
practically in rebellion, to defend its proscribed members. 
Within, the same week he continues to talk of La Vendue 
as the only centre of insurrection. He continues to be 
the Danton of old, although the Girondins are raising the 
standard of civil war on every side, and he maintains that 
continuous effort and compromise which had saved so much 
in the autumn of 1792, and which could do so little now. 
Within the Committee they framed the Constitution 
of 1793 — that great monument of democracy, which 
never took its place in history, nor ever affected the lives 
of men. It stands like an idol of great beauty which 
travellers find in a desert place; its religion has disap- 
peared from the earth ; no ruins surround it ; in the day 
when it was put up the men who raised it were driven 
from what should have been the centre of their adoration. 
That Danton was still in power when the result was de- 
bated in the Parliament during the third week of the 
month is evident from two things : first, that the Constitu- 
tion, with its broad guarantees of individual liberty and 
of local autonomy, with its liberal spirit, so nearly ap- 
proaching the great dream of Condorcet, so opposed to 
the narrow fanaticism of the Jacobins, was definitely 
intended to appease the growing passions of civil war. 
Two-thirds of France, of the country-sides at least, was 
arming because Paris had dared to touch the representa- 



THE TERROR 231 

tives of the nation. The Constitution Avas thrown like 
a hostage ; the men who saw the necessity for a dictator- 
ship said virtually, " The violence that offends you is only 
for a moment. Here is what we desire with the return 
of peace." And the document so responded to the heart 
of France that it succeeded. 

The second proof that Danton had still hold of the 
reins is to be found in this : that the advice which he 
gives during the discussions on the Constitution is not 
that of violence, nor of flattery, but of moderate common- 
sense ; and of such advice which the Convention accepts 
the best example is to be found in the speech on the 
power of making war. It was a difficult thing to 
convince the Assembly, in those days of abstractions, 
that the nation, as a whole, could not exercise such 
a right without hopeless confusion. Yet Danton had his 
way. This month of June, then, which was so full of 
terrible internal danger, during which Buzot had raised 
a Girondin army sixty miles from Paris, during which 
Normandy was in full revolt, during which Lyons had 
attacked the Republic, and during which the counter- 
Revolution seemed on the point of breaking out — this 
month was still Danton's own. He was secure in his 
public position, for the very conquerors of the 2nd of 
June, the violent extremists, could not prevent him from 
exercising his diplomacy abroad and his pacificatory 
compromise in domestic affairs. 

He was also secure in that which mattered so much 
more to him — I mean in his home. His mind had 
sufficiently steadied after the shock that had maddened 
him in February for him to follow the advice which 
his dead wife had left him. On the 17 th of June he 
re-married. The woman was not suited to Danton. She 
did not love him, nor probably did he love her. There 
were two young children, whom, in the winter, his first 
wife, finding herself to be dying, felt she was leaving 



232 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

orphans. The eldest was only three years old. This 
good woman, Catholic and devout, knowing her husband, 
and the sheer necessity for a home which his character 
had shown, determined on a religious education for her 
sons, and determined on a Catholic woman to be about 
her husband. She urged him to marry her younger friend, 
Mdlle. G^ly. An incident, which is doubtful, but which, 
on the whole, I accept, does not seem to me to prove 
the violence of an uncontrolled affection, but, on the 
contrary, to show a kind of indifference, as though 
Danton said to himself, " The thing must be done, and 
had better be done so as to offend the family as little as 
possible," I mean the story of his marriage before a 
non-juring priest. At any rate, that marriage shows an 
element of determination and security. He was still 
master of his fortunes and of himself. 

But he had called up a spirit too strong for him. 
July was to prove it. 

June, which had seen the rise of the Girondin in- 
surrection, had also seen its partial appeasement and 
suppression. It was, as we have said, the Constitution, 
hurriedly improvised for this purpose, that had been the 
main cause of such a success, but there remained for 
July, more dangerous than ever, the foreign invasion and 
the three outstanding strongholds of the civil war — 
Lyons, Toulon, and La Vendee. It was against them 
and their growing success, against the rebels and the 
invaders, that the Terror was serviceable, and it was on 
account of their continual progress that the Terror 
assumed such fearful proportions. 

I said earlier in this chapter that Danton inaugurating 
and strengthening the dictatorship of the Revolutionary 
Government was like a man deliberately opening a sluice 
behind which was the whole sea. There was an element 
of uncertainty upon the chances of which he had staked 
the success of his effort, and, with the reverses, he soon 



THE TERROR 233 

discovered tliat tlie forces wliicli he had let loose were 
going beyond him. It may be that he thought the 
results of the 2nd of June would be more immediate 
than they were. As a fact, it took many months to 
recover the position which the supineness of the Girondins 
had lost. In those months the Kevolutionary Govern- 
ment crystallised, as it were, became permanent, and fell 
into the hands of the extremists. 

On the very day that the Norman insurrection was 
crushed at Vernon, a Norman girl stabbed Marat. It is 
not within the scope of this book to deal at any great 
length with the fate of the man whom Danton had called 
" I'individu." That most striking and picturesque episode 
concerns us only in this matter, that it was a powerful 
impetus to the system of the Terror, and such an one 
as Danton, with all his judgment, could not possibly have 
foreseen. Moreover, on the very day that Marat was 
killed, the allied forces entered Warsaw, and there can 
be no doubt that the success of this infamy gave them 
a freer hand morally, at least upon the French frontier. 
Mayence fell, and its fall cost the life of Josephine's first 
husband. The Allies had crossed the Rhine. Five days 
later, on the 28 th of July, Valenciennes fell. At the same 
moment the Spaniards were pouring in east and west 
of the Pyrenees, and the Piedmontese had crossed the 
Alps. From a little press in Newcastle (the family 
of the printer yet remain to tell the tale), Pitt was 
drawing the thousands of forged assignats to ruin the 
Republic. Five foreign armies were occupying the terri- 
tory of France, and late in the following month the 
Spanish and English fleets were admitted to the harbour 
and arsenal of Toulon. Let it then be granted that, with 
the possible exception of the Roman power after Cannae, 
no power in history was ever so near destruction as was 
Revolutionary France in that summer. 

Let us see how the misfortunes of the country 



234 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

reacted upon the position of Danton. Already, with, early 
July, lie felt himself pressed and constrained by the 
growing power of the Jacobin doctrine and of its high 
priest. His system of conciliation, his attempts (in large 
part successful) to coax rather than to defeat the insur- 
rection, were violently criticised in the debate of the 4th. 
The anger against the Girondins, which the death of 
Marat was to increase to so violent a degree, produced 
the report of St. Just upon the 8th of July, which, though 
history has called it moderate, yet mentions the accusation 
of Vergniaud and of Gaudet, and to this Danton was 
forced reluctantly to put his name. Two days afterwards 
the old Committee to which he had belonged was dis- 
solved and a new one was elected. 

It would be an error to regard this as a mere resigna- 
tion on the part of Danton ; it would be equally an 
error to regard it as a violent censure on the part of the 
Convention. It is certain that he chose to withdraw 
because the fatal necessity of things was giving power to 
men of whom he had no opinion. Thus Kobespierre 
joined the Committee on the 27th of July — Robespierre, 
of whom Danton could say in private, " The man has not 
wits enough to cook an egg." Yet this was the man who 
was so worshipped by the crowd, that, once within the 
Committee, he was destined to become the master of 
France. It may be remarked in passing that something 
fatal seemed to attach to the date on which a man 
entered and began to lead the Committee. On the day 
that Danton entered in '93, on that day was he guillotined 
in '94. On the day that Robespierre entered in '93, on 
that day in '94 he fell. 

Danton remained, for a little longer than a month, 
more and more separate from the management of affairs, 
more and more out of sympathy with the men who 
were conducting the government. Nevertheless, he stands 
almost as an adviser and certainly with pure disinterested- 



THE TERROR 235 

ness throughout the month of August. He was alone. 
Desmoulins was more with Robespierre than with him 
at that moment. Westermann, his great friend and ally 
on the loth of August 1792, was under censure for his 
defeat in Vendee. But standing thus untrammelled, 
Danton for the moment appears with an especial brilliancy. 
Indeed there is no act of his public life so clear, so 
typical of his method, or so successful as his great speech 
on the 1st of August. It was as though, divorced from 
the pre-occupations of political intrigue and free from 
the responsibility of executive power, he was able for the 
first time in his whole life to speak his mind fully and 
clearly. The speech is a precis, as it were, of all his 
pronouncements on the necessity for a dictatorship and 
the methods it should employ. It turns round this 
sentence, " I demand that the Committee of Public 
Safety should be erected into a Provisional Government." 
He said openly that while he asked for absolute powers 
for the Committee, he refused ever to join it again. He 
pointed out to them the necessity of uniting all power 
in the hands of one body, of making a unique command 
for a nation at war. To men who had been lost for so 
long in the discussion of constitutional checks and guar- 
antees, he talked of the necessities as a general would 
to his staff. If you will read this speech through, you 
will find it to be the clearest exposition in existence of 
the causes and of the methods of the action of France 
in all her dangers from that day to our own. This speech, 
which is the climax of his career, and which stands at 
the fountain-head of so much in the modern nation, was 
followed throughout the month by many a piece of 
practical and detailed advice. He talks always quietly, 
and always with a specific object in view, on the edu- 
cational proposals, on the great conscription (14th of 
August), on the enforcement of an absolute military 
discipline ( 1 5 th of August), and so forth. But while 



236 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

he is still in this position, of which the brilliancy and 
success have deceived some into thinking that it was 
the centre of his career, two things were at work which 
were to lead to the strange crisis in which he lost his 
life. First, the Terror was beginning to be used for pur- 
poses other than those of the National Defence. Secondly, 
there was coming upon him lethargy and illness. He 
seems to have remained for a whole month, from the 
middle of September till the middle of October, without 
debating. There had come a sudden necessity for repose 
into his life, and until it was satisfied he gave an impres- 
sion of weakness and of breaking down. 

This was emphasised by a kind of despair, as he saw 
the diplomatic methods abandoned in dealing with foreign 
nations and the personal aims of the mystics, the private 
vengeance of the bloodthirsty, or the ravings of the rank 
madmen capturing the absolute system which he had 
designed and forged at the expense of his titanic powers. 
It was during this period that Garat saw him, and has 
left us the picture of his great body bowed by illness, 
and his small deep eyes filled with tears, as he spoke 
of the fate that was following the Girondins, and of 
how he could not save them. It was then also that, 
walking slowly with Desmoulins at sunset by the Seine, 
he said with a shudder that had never taken him before, 
" The river is running blood." 

With October the Terror weighed on all France by 
the decree of the month before. The suspects were 
arrested right and left, and the country had entered into 
one of those periods which blacken history and leave 
gaps which many men dare not bridge by reading. He 
broke down and fled for quiet to his native place. From 
thence the Great Mother, of whom in all the Eevolution 
he had been the truest son, sent him back to fulfil the 
mercy and the sanity of Nature as he had up till then 
fulfilled her energies. 



THE TERROR 237 

This book is the life of a man, and a man is his 
mind. Danton, who has left no memoirs, no letters even 
— of whose life we know so little outside the field of 
politics — can only be interpreted, like any other man, by 
the mind. We must seek the origin, though we have 
but a phrase or two to guide us. What was that medi- 
tation at Arcis out of which proceeded the forlorn hope 
of the " Vieux Cordelier " and of the " Committee of 
Indulgence " ? 

He was ill already ; the great energies which had been 
poured out recklessly in a torrent had suddenly run dry. 
Garat saw him weak, uncertain, refusing to leave his 
study, troubled in the eyes. The reins were out of his 
hands ; all that he thought, or rather knew, to be fatal to 
the Republic was succeeding, and every just conception, 
all balance, was in danger. This, though it was not the 
cause of his weariness, coincided with it, and made his 
sadness take on something of despair. There had always 
been in his spirit a recurrent desire for the fields and 
rivers ; it is common to all those whom Nature has blessed 
with her supreme gift of energy. He had at this moment 
a hunger for his native place, for the Champagne after 
the harvest, and for the autumn mists upon the Aube. 
It was in this attitude, weary, despairing, ill, and needing 
the country as a parched man needs water, that he asked 
and obtained permission to leave the Convention. It 
was upon the 1 2th of October, just as the worst phase of 
the Terror was beginning, that he left the violence and 
noise of the city and turned his face eastward to the cool 
valley of the Marne. 

Starting from this point, his weariness and his longing 
for home, we can trace the movement of his mind during 
the six weeks of his repose. He recovered health with 
the rapidity that so often characterises men of his stamp ; 
he found about him the peaceable ajffection, the cessation 
of argument and of self-defence which his soul had not 



238 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

known since tlie first days of 1789. His old mother 
was with him, and his children also, the memories of his 
own childhood. The place refreshed him like sleep ; he 
became again the active and merry companion of four 
years before, sitting long at his meals, laughing with his 
friends. The window of the ground-floor room opened 
on to the Grande Place, and there are still stories of him 
in Arcis making that window a kind of little rendezvous 
for men passing and repassing whom he knew, his chatting 
and his questions, his interests on every point except that 
political turmoil in which the giant had worn himself out. 
The garden was a great care of his, and he was concerned 
for the farm in which he had invested the reimbursement 
of his pre-revolutionary office. He delighted to meet his 
father's old friends, the mayor, the functionaries of the 
place. This man, whom we find so typical of his fellow- 
countrymen, is never more French than in his home. 
The little provincial town, the amour du docker, the pros- 
pect of retirement in the province where one was born 
— the whole scene is one that repeats itself upon every 
side to-day in the class from which Danton sprang. 

Moreover, as quiet took back its old place in his soul, 
he saw, no longer troubled, but with calmness and cer- 
tainty, the course that lay before the Republic. The 
necessity of restraint, which had irritated and pursued 
him in his days of fever in Paris, was growing into a 
settled and deliberate policy ; he began to study the posi- 
tion of France like a map ; no noise nor calumny was 
present to confuse him, and his method of action on 
his return developed itself with the clearness that had 
marked his first attitude in the elections of Paris. How 
rapidly his mind was working even his friends could not 
tell. One of them thought to bring him good news, and 
told him of the death of the Girondins. Danton was in 
his garden talking of local affairs, and when this was told 
him, the vague reputation which he bore, the " terrible 



THE TERROR 239 

Danton," and tlie fear lie had inspired, led tliem to 
expect some praise. He turned as though he had been 
stabbed, and cried sharply, " Say nothing. Do you call 
that good news ? It is a terrible misfortune. ... It 
menaces us all." And no one understood what was pass- 
ing in his mind. It was the note that Garat had heard, 
and later Desmoulins : " I did my best to save them ; I 
wish to God I could have saved them ! " 

Whatever other news reached Arcis in those terrible 
months served only to confirm him more strongly in his 
new attitude. Had he been tinged in the slightest 
degree with the mysticism that was common to so many 
in that time he would have felt a mission. But he was 
a Champenois, the very opposite of a mystic, and he only 
saw a task, a thing to be planned and executed by the 
reason. Perhaps if he had had more of the exaltation of 
the men he was about to oppose he might have succeeded. 

It was upon the 2 1 st of November that he returned 
to Paris. His health had come back, his full vigour, and 
with the first days of his reappearance in politics the 
demand for which the whole nation was waiting is heard. 
And what had not the fanatics done during the weeks of 
his silence ! Lyons, the Queen, the Girondins, Roland's 
wife — the very terms of politics had run mad, and he 
returned to wrestle with furies. 

Let me describe the confusion of parties through 
which Danton had to wade in his progress towards the 
re-establishment of Hberty and of order. As for the 
Convention itself, nominally the master, it was practically 
of no power. It chose to follow now one now another 
tendency or man ; to be influenced by fear at this 
moment, by policy at that, and continually by the Revo- 
lutionary formulae.' In a word, it was led. Like every 
large assembly, it lacked initiative. Above it and struggling 
for power were these : First, the committees, that of 
Public Safety, and its servant, that of General Security — 



240 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

tlie Government and the police. It was Danton, as we 
know, who desired to make the committees supreme, who 
had raised them as the institution, the central govern- 
ment. But by this time they were a despotism beyond 
the reach of the checks which Danton had always desired. 
To save so mighty an engine from the dangers of ambi- 
tion, he had resigned in July. His sacrifice or lethargy 
did not sufiice. The Committee which had once been 
Danton was now the Triumvirate — Robespierre, Couthon, 
St. Just. It pursued their personal objects, it maintained 
by the Terror their personal creed. Still Danton did not 
desire to destroy it as a system. He wished to modify 
its methods and to change its personnel, to let it merge 
gradually into the peaceable and orderly government for 
which the Revolution and the Republic had been made. 
By a strange necessity, the workers, the men who were 
most like Danton in spirit, the practical organisers on the 
Committee, such as Carnot, Prieur, and Lindet, could not 
help defending it in every particular. They knew the 
necessity of staying at their post, and they feared, with 
some justice, that if the Robespierrian faction was elimi- 
nated their work might be suddenly checked. It was 
because they were practical and short-sighted that they 
were opposed to the practical but far-sighted policy of 
Danton. They feared that with the cessation of the 
Terror the armies would lack recruits, the commissariat 
provisions, the treasury its taxes. 

Against the Committee was the Commune. Hubert 
at its worst ; Clootz at its most ideal ; Pache at its most 
honest. This singular body represented a spirit very 
close indeed to anarchy. It preached atheism as a kind 
of dogma ; it was intolerant of everything ; it was as mad 
as Clootz, as filthy as Hebert. It possessed a curious 
mixture of two rages — the rage for the unity and defence 
of France, the rage for the autonomy of Paris. In the 
apathy that had taken the voters this small and insane 



THE TERROR 241 

group lield command of the city. But the Committees 
were not what the Girondins had been. You could not 
bully or proscribe Carnot, St. Just, Cambon, Jean Bon. 
With the fatal pressure of the stronger wrestler the Com- 
mittee was pressing the Commune down. The Terror 
remained in either case. But with the Committee supreme 
it was a Terror of system striking to maintain a tyranny, 
a pure despotism working for definite ends. Had the 
Commune succeeded, it would have meant the Terror 
run mad, the guillotine killing for the sake of killing — 
and for ever. 

The third party in the struggle was Robespierre. He 
also desired the Terror, but he intended to use it, as he 
did every power in France, towards a definite end — a cer- 
tain perfect state, of which he had received a revelation, 
and of which he was the prophet. Of his aims and char- 
acter I shall treat when I come to his action after the fall 
of Danton. It sufiices to point out here that of the three 
forces at work Robespierre alone had personality to aid him. 
He had a guard, a group of defenders. They were inside, 
and led the Committee itself; they were the mystics in a 
moment of strong exaltation, and unreal as was the dream 
of their chief, the Robespierrians were bound to succeed 
unless the force of the real, the " cold water " that came 
with Danton's return, should destroy their hopes. There- 
fore, as a fact, though no one, though Danton himself, did 
not see it, it was between him and Robespierre that the 
battle would ultimately be fought out. 

For what was Danton's plan ? He put into his new 
task the ability, the ruse, the suppleness that he had only 
lost for a moment in the summer. First, Hubert and the 
" enrages " must go — they were the vilest form of the 
spirit that he perceived to be destroying the Republic. 
Then the Committee must be very gradually weakened. 
In that task he hoped, vainly enough, to make Robespierre 
his ally. And finally, the end of all his scheme was the 

Q 



242 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

cessation of the Terror. He had created a dictatorship 
for a specific purpose ; that purpose was attained. Wat- 
tignies had been won, Lyons captured; soon La Vendee 
was to be destroyed, and even Toulon to fall. It was in- 
tolerable that a system abnormal and extreme, designed 
to save the State, should be continued for the profit of a 
few theorists or of a few madmen. How much had not 
his engine already done ? — this machine which, to the 
horror of its creator, had found a life of its own ! It had 
killed the Queen after a shocking trial; it had alienated 
what was left of European sympathy ; it had struck the 
Girondins, and Danton was haunted by the inspired voice 
of Vergniaud singing the " Marseillaise " upon the scaffold ; 
it had run to massacre in the provinces. He feared (and 
later his fears proved true at Nantes) that September might 
be repeated with the added horror of legal forms. The 
Terror finally had reopened the question that of all others 
might most easily destroy the State. A handful of men 
had pretended to uproot Catholicism for ever, and what 
Danton cursed as the " Masque Anti-Religieuse " had 
defiled Notre Dame. This flood he was determined to turn 
back into the channels of reason ; he was going, without 
government or police or system, merely by his voice and 
his ability, to realise the Revolution, to end the dictatorship, 
and to begin the era of prosperity and of content. 

The first steps taken were successful. On the very 
night of his return, Robespierre was perorating at the 
Jacobins against atheism and on the great idea of God, 
but within twelve hours, on the morrow, Danton's voice 
gave the new note. It was in the discussion upon the 
pension to be paid to the priests whom the last decree had 
thrust out of their regular office and of its salary. Dan- 
ton spoke with the greatest decision on this plain matter, 
and the Convention heard with delight the fresh phrases to 
which it had so long been a stranger. He says virtually, 
" If you do not pay this sum you are persecutors." There 



THE TERROR 243 

are in this speech such sentences as these: "You must 
appreciate this, that politics can only achieve when they 
are accompanied by some reason. ... I insist upon your 
sparing the blood of men ; and I beg the Convention to 
be, above all, just to all men except those who are the 
declared and open enemies of the Kepublic." Four days 
later he went a little further, and the Convention still 
followed him. On the question which he had most at 
heart he spoke plainly. Richard complained of Tours. 
He said that the municipality of that town were arresting 
" suspects " right and left, and had even attacked himself. 
Danton said in a speech of ten lines : " It is high time 
the Convention should learn the art of government. Send 
these complaints to the Committee. It is chosen, or at 
least supposed to be chosen, from the elite of the Conven- 
tion." Later in the same day he spoke on a ridiculous 
procession such as the violence of the time had made 
fashionable. It was a deputation of Hebertists bringing 
from a Parisian church the ornaments of the altar. Al- 
ready, it will be remembered, the Commune had ordered 
the churches in Paris to be closed, and the attempt to 
enforce such scenes were being copied in all the large 
towns of France. He said : " Let there be no more of 
these mascarades in the Convention. ... If people here 
and there wish to prove their abjuration of Catholicism, 
we are not here to prevent them . . . neither are we 
here to defend them. . . . The Terror is still necessary, 
the Revolutionary Government is still necessary, but the 
people does not demand this indiscriminate action. We 
have no business save with the conspirators and with 
those who are treating with the enemy." There was a 
protest from Fayan, who cried, " You have talked of 
clemency ! " for all the world as though such talk was 
blasphemy. But Danton was getting back his old posi- 
tion and was leading the Convention. His success seemed 
certain. On the 3rd of December (14th Frimaire) he was 



244 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

violently attacked at the Jacobins, but be managed to 
hold his own. Robespierre defended him in a speech 
which has been interpreted as a piece of able treachery, 
but which may with equal justice be regarded as an 
attempt to hold himself between the opposing parties ; 
and within a fortnight after his return Danton, who had 
in him a directness of purpose and a rapidity of action 
that prefigured Napoleon, had gained every strategic point 
in his attack. 

Events helped him, or rather he had foreseen them. 
The Vendeans, moving more like a mob than an army, 
were caught at Le Mans on the 13 th of December. On 
the 7th of December the genius of Bonaparte had driven 
the English and Spanish from Toulon, On the 26th the 
news came to the army of which Hoche had just been 
given the command, and, as though the name Bonaparte 
brought a fate with it, the lines of Wissembourg were carried, 
Landau was relieved, the Austrians passed the Rhine. 

All these victories were the allies of the party of in- 
dulgence. The men who said, " The Terror has no raison 
d'etre save that of the national defence," found themselves 
expressing what all France felt. After such successes it 
only remained to add, " The nation is safe ; the Terror 
may end." Already Danton had called up a reserve, so 
to speak, in the shape of the genius of Desmoulins. The 
first issue of " Vieux Cordelier " had appeared, and the 
journal was read by all Paris. 

That club, in which we saw the origin of Danton's 
fame, was now the H^bertists, and nothing more. The 
pamphlets which Camille issued under the leadership of 
Danton were given a name that might recall its position 
and its politics of the old days. . And indeed the two 
men most concerned in the new policy of clemency had 
been, from their house in the Cour du Commerce, the 
heart of the " R^publique des Cordeliers." There are not 
in the history of the Revolution, in all the passages of its 



THE TERROR 245 

eloquence and genius, any words that strike us to-day as 
do the words of these six pamphlets which spread over 
the winter of the year II. It is a proof of Danton's clear 
vision, of his strong influence, that a distant posterity, far 
removed from the passions of 1793, should find its own 
expression in the appeals which his friend wrote, and 
which form the Testament of the Indulgents. 

The first two numbers were an attack upon the 
H^bertists alone. Robespierre, from his position in the 
Committee of Public Safety, from the spur of his own 
ambition, was wilhng to agree. He himself corrected the 
proofs. But on the 15th of December appeared the 
famous Numero III., which ran through Paris like a 
herald's message, which did for reaction something of 
what the great speeches had done for liberty in clubs 
during the early days of the Revolution. Few men cared 
to vote, but every man read the " Vieux Cordelier." To 
those who had never so much as heard of Tacitus the 
pen of Tacitus carried conviction. A crowd of women 
passed before the Parliament crying for the brothers and 
husbands who filled the prisons ; the " Committee of 
Clemency" was within an ace of being formed; and, 
coinciding with the victories and with Danton's reappear- 
ance, the demand of Desmoulins was dragging after it, not 
France only (for France was already convinced), but even 
the capital. It was then that the Committee, who alone 
were the government, grew afraid. Robespierre still 
hesitated. He could only succeed through the commit- 
tees ; but Desmoulins was his friend ; there was an appeal 
to "the old college friend" in the "Vieux Cordelier" 
that touched his heart and his vanity; they had sat 
together on the benches of the Louis le Grand, and 
Robespierre seems to have made an honefct attempt to aid 
Lim then. A fourth number had appeared on the 20th, a 
fifth (written on Christmas Day) appeared on January 8th. 

The Jacobins denounced Camille, and Robespierre, the 



246 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

eyes of whose mind looked as closely and were as short- 
siglited as the eyes of his body, grew afraid. The men 
determined on rigour had warned him in the Committee ; 
now when he tried to defend Camille he saw the Jacobins 
raging : what he did not see was France. Perhaps, had 
his sight been longer, he would not have been dragged six 
months later to the guillotine. He attempted a compro- 
mise and said : " We will not expel Camille, but we will 
burn his journal, punishing his act but not himself." 
Camille answered with Rousseau, "BrUUr 71 est pas repondre." 
He would not be defended. 

The battle was closely joined. Desmoulins was push- 
ing forward his attack with the audacious infantry of 
pamphlets ; Danton, from the Convention, was giving from 
time to time the heavy blows of the artillery ; the advance 
was continuous ; when there was felt a check that proved 
the prelude to disaster and that showed, behind the oppos- 
ing lines, the force of the Committees. In the middle of 
January, just after Desmoulins's defence at the Jacobins, 
Fabre D'Eglantine, the friend and old secretary of Danton, 
was arrested. It was in vain that Danton put into his 
defence all the new energy which he had discovered in 
himself. It was in vain even that he called for " the 
right of the deputy to defend himself at the bar of the 
house." Like all organised governments, the Committee 
could give reasons of State for this silent action. Danton 
was overborne, and the Convention for the first time since 
his return deserted him. 

He had yet seven weeks to live. Desmoulins still 
attacked, but Danton knew that the action was lost. He 
knew the strength of that powerful council whose first 
efforts he himself had moulded, and when he saw it arise 
in support of continuing the Terror, when he saw it and 
Robespierre allied, he lost hope. The policy of the 
Committee grew more and more definite. One member 
of it, (Herault de Sechelles) was Danton's friend: they 



THE TERROR 247 

expelled him. Silently, but with all their strength, they 
disengaged the government from either side. The Com- 
mittee and Robespierre determined to strike at once, 
when the occasion should arise, both those in the Com- 
mune who desired to turn the Terror to their own ends 
and those of the Convention — the Dantonists, who desired 
to end it altogether. 

Danton still speaks in the tribune, but the attack is 
no longer there. He defends modestly and well the prac- 
tical propositions that appear before the Parliament on 
education, on the abolition of slavery, on the provisions 
for the giving of bail under the new judiciary system, and 
so forth. But there is in his attitude something of expec- 
tancy. He is waiting for a sudden attack that must come 
and that he cannot prevent. He holds himself ready, but 
the Committee is working in the dark, and he does not 
know on which side to guard himself. A last personal 
interview with Robespierre failed, and there was nothing 
left to do but to wait and see whether they feared him 
so much as to dare his arrest. It was with Ventose, that 
is, with the first days of March, that the blow fell. 

The H^bertists, chafing under three months of grow- 
ing insults — insults which their old ally the Committee 
refused to avenge — broke out into open revolt. Carrier was 
back from his truly H^bertist slaughtering at Nantes, and 
it was felt at the Cordeliers that the public execration 
would destroy them unless they rose. In ' the autumn 
they would have had the Committees on their side, but 
the strong action of the Indulgents had broken the 
alliance. They determined on insurrection. The Com- 
mune this time was, once and for all, to conquer the 
government. The decision was taken at the Cordeliers 
on the 4th of March — within ten days they were arrested. 
The Committee pushed them through the form of a trial. 
Less than three weeks after the first talk of revoltj Hebert, 
Clootz, and the rest were guillotined. 



248 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

There were many among the Dantonists wlio thouglit 
this the triumph of their poHcy. " The violent, the en- 
rages are dead. It is we who did it." But Danton was 
wiser than his followers. He knew that the Committee 
were waiting for such an opportunity, and that a blow 
to the right would follow that blow to the left. Both 
oppositions were doomed. Only one chance remained to 
him — they might not dare. 

On the occasion of the arrest of the H^bertists he 
made a noble speech on the great lines of concihation and 
unity, which had been his constant policy — a speech which 
was all for Paris, in spite of the faction. 

But that week they determined on his arrest and that 
of his friends. Panis heard of it, and sent at once to warn 
him. He found him in the night of the last day of March 
1794 sitting in his study with his young nephew, moody 
and silent. His wife was asleep in the next room. On 
the flat above him Camille and Lucille were watching 
late. The house was silent. Panis entered and told him 
what the Committee had resolved. " Well, what then ? " 
said Danton. " You must resist." " That means the 
shedding of blood, and I am sick of it. I would rather 
be guillotined than guillotine." " Then," said Panis, " you 
must fly, and at once." But Danton shook his head still 
moodily. " One does not take one's country with one on 
the soles of one's boots." But he muttered again to him- 
self, " They will not dare — they will not dare." Panis left 
him, and he sat down again to wait, for he knew in his 
heart that the terrible machine which he himself had 
made, and which he had fought so heroically, could dare 
what it chose. They left him silent in the dark room. 
From time to time he stirred the logs of the fire ; the 
sudden flame threw a light on the ugly strength of his 
face : he bent over the warmth motionless, and with the 
memories of seven years in his heart. 



CHAPTER VII 
THE DEATH OF DANTON 

In the mght tlie armed police came round to tlie Passage 
du Commerce ; one part of the patrol grounded their 
muskets and halted at the exits of the street, the other 
entered the house. 

Desmoulins heard the butts falling together on the 
flagstones, and the little clink of metal which announces 
soldiery; he turned to his wife and said, "They have 
come to arrest me." And she held to him till she 
fainted and was carried away. Danton, in his study 
alone, met the arrest without words. There is hardly 
a step in the tragedy that follows which is not marked 
by his comment, always just, sometimes violent ; but 
the actual falling of the blow led to no word. Words 
were weapons with him, and he was not one to strike 
before he had put up his guard. 

They were taken to the Luxembourg, very close by, 
a little up the hill. We have the story of how Danton 
came with his ample, firm presence into the hall of the 
prison, and met, almost the first of his fellow-prisoners, 
Thomas Paine. The author of "The Rights of Man" 
stepped up to him, doubtless to address him in bad 
French.^ Danton forestalled him in the English of which 
he was a fair master. 

" Mr. Paine," he said, " you have had the happiness 
of pleading in your country a cause which I shall no 

^ Paine's ignorance of French was such that his speech on Louis's 
exile was translated for him. 

949 



250 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

longer plead in mine." He remembered Paine's sane 
and moderate view on the occasion of tlie king's trial, 
and lie envied one whose private freedom had remained 
untrammelled with the bonds of office; who had never 
been forced to a 2nd of June, nor had to keep to an 
intimate conversation his fears for the Girondins. Then 
he added that if they sent him to the scaffold he would 
go gaily. And he did. There was the Frenchman con- 
trasted with his English friend. 

Beaulieu, who heard him, tells us that he also turned 
to the prisoners about him and said, " Gentlemen, I had 
hoped to have you out of this, and here I am myself; I 
can see no issue." 

So the prisoners came in, anxiously watched by reac- 
tionaries, to whom, as to many of our modern scribblers, 
one leader of the Revolution is as good as another — 
Lacroix, Westermann (the strong soldier with his huge 
frame overtopping even Danton's), and Desmoulins. As 
they passed to their separate cells, for it was determined 
to prevent their communication, a little spirit of the old 
evil^ used the powerful venom of aristocracy, the un- 
answerable repartee of rank, and looking Lacroix up and 
down, said, " I could make a fine coachman of that 
fellow." He and his like would have ruined France for 
the sake of turning those words into action. 

Till the dawn of the i ith Germinal broke, they were 
kept in their separate rooms. But the place was not 
built for a prison. Lacroix and Danton in neighbouring 
rooms could talk by raising their voices, and we have of 
their conversation this fragment. Lacroix said, " Had I 
ever dreamt of this I could have forestalled it." And 
Danton's reply, with just - that point of fatalism which 
had forbidden him to be ambitious, answered, " I knew 
it ; " he had known it all that night. 

There was a force stronger than love — private and 
^ La Roche du Maine. 



THE DEATH OF DANTON 251 

public fear. It is a folly to ridicule, or even to misunder- 
stand that fear. The possessions, the families of many, 
the newly-acquired dignity of all, above everything, the 
new nation had been jeopardised how many times by a 
popular idol turned untrue. The songs of 1790 were all 
for Louis, many praised Bailly; what a place once had 
Lafayette ! Who had a word to say against Dumouriez 
eighteen months before ? The victories had just begun 
— barely enough to make men hesitate about the Terror. 
The " Vieux Cordelier " had led, not followed opinion, as it 
was just that the great centre of energy should lead and 
not follow the time. And, men would say, how do we 
know why he has been arrested, or at whose voice ? 
How can we tell where the sure compass of right, our 
Robespierre, stands in the matter ? and so forth. Nothing 
then was done ; but Paris very nearly moved. 

There were thus two gathering forces ; one vague and 
large, one small but ordered, and on the result of their 
shock hung the life of Danton — may one say (knowing 
the future) the life of the Republic ? 

Now the struggle with Europe had taught the Com- 
mittee a principal lesson. Perhaps one should add that 
the exuberant fighting power of the nation and of the 
age had forced the Committee to a certain method, 
apparent in the armies, in the measures, in the speeches : 
it was the method of detecting at once the weakest spot 
in the opposing line, and of abandoning everything for 
the purpose of concentrating all its strength and charging 
home. So their descendants to-day in their new army 
practise the marvellous massing of artillery which you 
may watch at autumn in the manoeuvres. 

What was the opposing line ? A vague ill-ordered 
crowd — Paris; the undisciplined Convention, lacking 
leaders, ignorant of party rule. Where was its weak- 
ness ? In the want of initiative, in the fact that, till 
some one spoke, no one could be sure of the strength of 



252 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

the corporate feeling. Also, on account of the public 
doubt, during that time men were grains of dust ; but the 
dust was like powder, and speech was always the spark 
which permitted the affinities of that powder to meet in 
fierce unity and power. A sudden blow had to be struck 
and the fire stamped out before it had gathered power ; 
this is how the check was given. 

In the morning of the 1 2 th Germinal the Convention 
met, and each man looked at his neighbour, and then, as 
though afraid, let his eyes wander to see if others thought 
as he did. At last one man dared to speak. It was 
Legendre the butcher ; ^ he vacillated later before a mix- 
ture of deceit in others and of doubt in himself, but it 
should be remembered to his honour that he nearly saved 
the Revolution by an honest word. " Let Danton be heard 
at the bar of the Convention," was his frank demand; 
common-sense enough, but it fatally opened his guard, 
and gave an opportunity to the thrusts most dangerous 
in the year II. — an accusation of desiring privilege, and 
an accusation of weakening that government which was 
visibly saving the state on the frontiers. 

Tallien was President that day, and he gave the reply 
to Robespierre. Now Robespierre was no good fencer. 
The supreme feint, the final disarming of opinion, was left 
to an abler man. He had gone home from the Committee 
to Duplay's house in the early morning; a monomaniac 
hardly needing sleep, he reappeared at the early meeting 
of the Convention. But, poor debater as he was, he could 

^ Levasseur tells us that Delmas spoke first, and that his remarks took 
the form of a definite motion for the appearance of the Committees to 
account for their action, Legendre is mentioned here because he alone 
is agreed upon by all the eye-witnesses (and by the Moniteur) as being the 
principal defender of Danton. We must not underestimate his courage ; 
it was he who with a very small force shut the club of the Jacobins on the 
night of the 9th Thermidor, and so turned the flank of the Eobespierrian 
faction. 



THE DEATH OF DANTON 253 

take advantage of so easy an opportunity. In a speecli 
wiiicli was twice applauded, lie asserted that Legendre liad 
demanded a privilege. He struck the note which above 
all others dominated those minds. "Are we here to de- 
fend principles or men ? Give the right of speech to 
Danton, and you give rein to an extraordinary talent, you 
confuse the issue with a hundred memories, you permit 
the bias of friendship. Let the man defend himself by 
proofs and witnesses, not by eloquence and sentiment." 
Yet he did not add — perhaps he hardly knew — that 
the memories and friendship would but have balanced 
a direct enmity, and that witnesses and proofs would be 
denied. Again he used that argument of government — 
had not they saved France ? were they not the head of 
the police ? did not they know in the past what they were 
doing ? He assured them that a little waiting would pro- 
duce conviction in them also. It did not, but time was 
gained ; already half the Convention doubted. 

Legendre, bewildered, faltered a reply; he admitted 
error, and begged Robespierre not to misunderstand. He 
could have answered for Danton as for himself, but the 
tribunal was of course to be trusted. It was almost an 
apology. 

On that changing, doubtful opinion came with the 
force of a steel mould the hard, high voice of St. Just. 

St. Just spoke rarely. There has been mention in an 
earlier part of this book of the speech against the Giron- 
dins. There will be mention again of a vigorous and a 
nearly successful attempt to save Robespierre. That he 
should have been given the task of defending the Com- 
mittee's action that day is a singular proof of the grip 
which they had of the circumstances. Barr^re could never 
have convinced an unsympathetic public opinion. Robes- 
pierre could meet a rising enthusiasm with nothing but dry 
and accurate phrases. But St. Just had the flame of his 
youth and of his energy, and his soul lived in his mouth. 



254 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

The report, even as we read it, lias eloquence. 
Coming from him then, with his extreme beauty, his 
upright and determined bearing, it turned the scale. 
The note of the argument was as ably chosen as could 
be ; moreover it represented without question the attitude 
of his own mind : it was this. " The last of the factions 
has to be destroyed; only one obstacle stands between 
you and the appreciation of the Republic.^ Time and 
again we have acted suddenly, but time and again we 
have acted well and on sufficient reasons — so it is now. 
If you save Danton you save a personality — something 
you have known and admired; you pay respect to in- 
dividual talent, but you ruin the attempt in which you 
have so nearly succeeded. For the sake of a man you 
will sacrifice all the new liberty which you are giving to 
the whole world." There follows a passionate apostrophe 
in which he speaks to Danton as though he stood before 
him, as striking as the parallel passage in the fourth 
Catiline Oration.^ Had Danton been present he would 
have been a man against a boy : a loud and strong voice, 
not violent in utterance, but powerful in phrase and in 
delivery, a character impressing itself by sheer force of 
self upon vacillating opinion. Had Danton spoken in 
reply, his hearers would have said with that moral con- 
viction which is stronger than proof, " This man is the 
chief lover of France." 

But such is rhetoric, its falsity and its success — 
the gaps of silence grew to a convincing power. The 
accusations met with no reply ; they remained the echo of 

^ "Quand les restes de la faction . . . ne serdnt plus . . . vous 
n'aurez plus d'exemples h donner . . . ils ne restera que le peuple et 
vous, et le gouvernement dont vous etes le centre inviolable." 

^ " Mauvais citoyen, tu as conspire ; faux ami, tu disais, il y a deux jours, 
du mal de Desmoulins que tu as perdu ; mechant homme, tu as compart 
I'opinion publique ^ une femme de mauvaise vie, tu as dit que I'honneur 
6tait ridicule ... si Fabre est innocent, si D'Orl^ans, si Dumouriez 
furent innocents tu I'est sans doute. J'en ai trop dit — tu repondras k, la 
justice." 



THE DEATH OF DANTON 255 

a living voice ; tlie answers to them could be framed only 
in the silent minds of the audience. The living voice 
won. 

And there was, as we have said, intense conviction 
to aid St. Just. He was a man who would forget and 
would exaggerate with all the faults of passion, but he 
believed the facts he gave. Not so Robespierre. Robe- 
spierre had furnished the notes of St. Just's report,-*- and 
Robespierre must have known that he had twisted all to 
one end. Robespierre was a man who was virtuous and 
true only to his ideal, not to his fellow-men. Robespierre 
had not deceived himself as he wrote, but he had deceived 
St. Just, and therefore the young " Archangel of Death " 
spoke with the added strength of faith, than which nothing 
leaps more readily from the lips to the ears. Can we 
doubt it ? There is a phrase which convinces. When 
he ends by telling them what it is they save by sacrificing 
one idol, when he describes the Republic, he uses the 
phrase common to all apostolates, the superb " les 
mots que nous avons dits ne seront jamais perdus sur la 
terre " — the things which they had said would never be 
lost on earth. 

It ended. No one voted ; the demand of the Com- 
mittee passed without a murmur. The Convention was 
never again its own mistress; it had silenced and con- 
demned itself.^ 

Meanwhile at the Luxembourg the magistrate Denizot 
was making the preparations for the trial. Each prisoner 
was asked the formal question of his guilt, and each 

^ Kobespierre's notes for St. Just's report were published by M. France 
in 1841 among the "Papiers trouv^s chez Eobespierre," 

^ "La Convention Nationale apr^s avoir entendu les rapports des 
Comitds de Surety gendrale at du Salut Public, decrfete d'accusation 
Camille Desmoulins, Herault, Danton, Phillippeaux Lacroix ... en con- 
sequence elle declare leur mise en jugement." These were the last words 
of St. Just's speech, and formed his substantive motion. 

" Ce d^cret est adopts a I'unanimit^ et au milieu des plus vifs applaud- 
Bsemeiits,"—Moniteur, April 2, 1794 (13th Germinal, year II.). 



256 THE LIFE OF D ANTON 

replied in a single negative, but Danton added that he 
would die a Eepublican, and to the question of their 
defence replied that he would plead his own cause. 
Then, at half-past eleven they were transferred to the 
Conciergerie. 

From that moment his position becomes the attitude 
of the man fighting, as we have known it in the crisis of 
August 1792 and of the calling up of the armies. Eeady 
as he had always been to see the real rather than the 
imaginary conditions, he recognised death with one chance 
only of escape. He knew far better than did poor Des- 
moulins the power of a State's machinery; he felt its 
grasp and doubted of any issue. The people, for Des- 
moulins, were the delegators of power ; for Danton the 
people were those who should, but who did not rule. 
To live again and enter the arena and save the life 
of the Eepublic the people must hear his voice, or else 
the fact of government would be more strong than all 
the rights and written justice in the world. 

He was like a man whose enemy stands before him, 
and who sees at his own side, passive and bewildered, a 
strong but foohsh ally. His ally was the people, his 
enemy was Death. 

Therefore we have of his words and actions for the 
next four days two kinds : those addressed to death 
and those to his ally. Where he desires to touch 
the spirit of the crowd — in what was for their ears — ■ 
we have the just, practical, and eloquent man apologising 
for over-vehemence, saying what should strike hardest 
home — an orator, but an orator who certainly uses 
legitimate weapons. 

But there is another side. In much that he said in 
prison, in all that he said on his way to the scaffold, he 
is simply speaking to Death and defjdng him. The 
inmost thing in a man, the stock of the race, appears 
without restraint; he becomes the Gaul. That most 



THE DEATH OF DANTON 257 

un-northern habit of defiance, especially of defiance to 
the inevitable and to the strongest, the custom of his 
race and their salvation, grows on his lips. 

He insults Death, he jests ; his language, never chaste 
or self-conscious, takes on the laughter of the Rabelaisian, 
and (true Rabelaisian again) he wraps up in half-a-dozen 
words the whole of a situation. 

Thus we see him leaning against the window of his 
prison and calling to Westermann in the next cell, " Oh ! 
if I could leave my legs to Couthon ^ and my virility to 
Robespierre, things might still go on." And again when 
Lacroix said, " I will cut my own hair at the neck, so 
that Sanson the executioner shall not meddle with it," 
Danton replied, " Yet will Sanson intermeddle with the 
vertebrae of your neck." So he meets death with a broad 
torrent of words; and that a civilisation accustomed 
rather to reticence should know what this meant in him, 
my readers must note his powerful asides to Desmoulins 
and to H^rault, coinciding with the fearful pun in which 
he tried to raise the drooping courage of D'Eglantine. 

Also in his prison this direct growth of the soil of 
France " talked often of the fields and of rivers." Shake- 
speare should have given us the death scenes of so 
much energy, defiance, coarseness, affection, and great 
courage. 

In the Conciergerie they spent the rest of the day 
waiting for the trial, and this time Danton was next to 
Westermann, to whom and to Desmoulins he said, " We 
must say nothing save before the Committees or at the 
trial." It was his plan to move the people by a public 
defence, but his enemies in power had formed a counter- 
plan, and, as we shall see, forestalled him. 

^ Couthon was a cripple. Once (later) in the Convention it was called 
out to him " Triumvir," and he glanced at his legs and said, " How could 
I be a triumvir ? " The logical connection between good legs and trium- 
virates was more apparent to himself than to those whom he caused to be 
guillotined. 

E 



258 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Desmoulins, " the flower that grew on Danton," was 
still bewildered. So he remained to the end ; at the foot 
of the scaffold he could not understand. " If I could only 
have written a No. VII. I would have turned the tables." ^ 
" It is a duel of Commodus ; they have the lance and I 
have not even a reed." To that man, his equal in years,^ 
but a boy compared with him in spirit, Danton had 
always shown, and now continued to show, a peculiar 
affection. He treated him like a younger brother, and 
never made him suffer those violent truths with which 
all France and most of his friends were familiar in his 
mouth. So now, and in the trial, and on the way to the 
scaffold, his one attempt was to calm the bitter violence 
and outburst of Camille. 

There are two phrases of Danton's which have been 
noted on this first day passed at the Conciergerie, and 
which cannot be omitted, though in form they have not 
his diction, yet in spirit they might be his; they are 
recollections presumably of something of greater length 
called to Westermann. 

The first : " On such a day ^ I demanded the institu- 
tion of the Revolutionary tribunal. I ask pardon of God 
and of man." 

The second: "I am leaving everything at sixes and 
sevens ; one had better be a poor fisherman than meddle 
with the art of governing men." There you have the 
real Danton — a reminiscence of some strong and passionate 

^ We have the fragments of this " No. VII.," which was not published. 
See M. Claretie's C. Desmoulins, p. 274 of Mrs. Cashel Hoey's trans- 
lation. 

2 Danton would have been thirty-five in October. Desmoulins had 
been thirty-four in March — not thirty-three, as he said at the trial. I 
give this on the authority of M. Claretie, who in his book quotes the birth- 
certificate, which he himself had seen (March 2, 1760). 

^ March 10, 1793. Exception has been taken to the whole sentiment 
by Dr. Robinet, but great, or rather unique, as is his authority, I cannot 
believe that an appeal — especially an exclamatory appeal of this nature — 
was foreign to his impetuous and merciful temper. 



THE DEATH OF DANTON 259 

utterance put into this undantonesque and proverbial 
form. A real sentiment of his — all of him; careless 
of life, intense upon the interests of life, above all upon 
the future of the Revolution and of France, knowing the 
helpless inferiority of the men he left behind. 'And in 
the close of the phrase it is also he ; it is the spirit of 
great weariness which had twice touched him, as sleep 
an athlete after a day of games. It was soon to take 
the form of a noble sentence : " Nous avons assez servi 
— aliens dormir." 

On the 13th (April 2, 1794), about ten in the morn- 
ing, they were led before the tribunal. 

The trial began. 

It must not be imagined that the Dantonists alone 
came before the tribunal to answer for their particular 
policy. There had originated under Robespierre (and later 
when he alone was the master it was to be terribly abused) 
the practice of confusing the issues. Three groups at least 
were tried together, and the Moderates sat between two 
thieves — for D'Eglantine on a charge of embezzlement 
alone, Guzman, the Freys as common thieves and spies to 
the Republic, were associated on the same bench. Four- 
teen in all, they sat in the following order : — Chabot, 
Bazire, Fabre, Lacroix, Danton, Delaunay, Herault, Des- 
mouHns, Guzman, Diederichsen, Phillippeaux, D'Espagnac, 
and the two Freys. D'Eglantine occupied " the arm- 
chair," and it will be seen that the fim — the Moderates — 
were carefully scattered. 

The policy was a deliberate one ; it was undertaken 
with the object of prejudicing public opinion against the 
accused. Nor was it permitted to each group to be 
separate in accusation and in its method of defence. They 
were carefully linked to each other by men accused of 
two out of the three crimes. 

Herman was president of the tribunal, and sat facing 
the prisoners ; on either side of him were Masson-Denizot, 



i6o THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Foucault and Brave, the assistant-judges. They say that 
VouUaud and Vadier, of the lower committee, appeared 
behind the bench to watch the enemies whom they had 
caught in the net. Seven jurors were in the box to the 
judges' left, by name Renaudin (whom Desmoulins chal- 
lenged in vain), Desboisseaux, Trinchard, Dix-Aout, Lu- 
miere, Ganney, Souberbielle,^ and to these we must add 
Topino-Lebrun, whose notes form by far the most vivid 
fragment by which we may reconstruct the scene. The 
jury of course was packed.^ It was part of the theory of 
the Revolutionary Government that no chance element 
should mar its absolute dictatorship. It was practi- 
cally a court of judges, absolute, and without division of 
powers. 

At a table between the President and the prisoners sat 
Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor ; and finally, on 
the judges' right was the open part of the court and the 
door to the witnesses' room. 

Here was a new trial with a great and definite chance 
of acquittal, a scene the like of which had not been seen 
for a year, nor would be seen again in that room. The 
men on the prisoners' bench had been the masters, one of 
them the creator, of the court which tried them ; they 
were evidently greater and more powerful than their 
judges, and had behind them an immense though infor- 
mal weight of popularity. They were public men of the 
first rank ; their judges and the public prosecutor were 
known to be merely the creatures of a small committee. 
More than this, it was common talk that the Convention 
might yet change its mind, and even among the jury it 
was certain that discussion would arise. 

By the evidence of a curious relic we know that the 

^ Wallon, Trihwnal Rivolutionnaire, vol. iii. p. 1 56. 

2 It is known that Fleuriot and Fouquier were alone when the jury 
were "chosen by lot." This appeared at the trial of Fouquier. For the 
notes of Lebrun, see Appendix X. 



THE DEATH OF DANTON 261 

Committee actually feared a decree or a coup-de-main 
which would have destroyed their power. This note 
remains in the archives, a memorandum of a decision 
arrived at in the Committee on the early morning of the 
13 th or late in the night of the 12 th. 

"Henriot to he written to, to tell him to issue an order that 
the President and the Public Prosecutor of the Revolutionary 
Tribunal are not to he arrested." 

Then in another hand : 

" Get four memhers to sign this." 

Finally, the memorandum is endorsed in yet another 
hand: 

" i^th Germinal. — A policeman took this the same 
day!' ^ 

It will thus be seen that the Committee was by no 
means sure of its ground. It had indeed procured through 
St. Just the decree preventing Danton from pleading at 
the bar of the Convention and permitting his trial, but it 
would require the most careful manceuvring upon their 
part to carry through such an affair. As we shall see, 
they just — and only just — succeeded. 

The whole of the first day (the 13th Germinal, 2nd 
of April 1794) was passed in the formal questions and in 
the reading of accusations. Camille, on being asked his 
age and dwelling, made the blasphemous and striking 
answer which satisfied the dramatic sense, but was not a 
true reply to the main question. 

Danton gave the reply so often quoted : " I am Dan- 
ton, not unknown among the revolutionaries. I shall be 
living nowhere soon, but you will find my name in Wal- 
halla," The other answers, save that of H^rault, attempted 
no phrases. 

Yet Guzman would have made more point of his 
assertion if he had chosen that moment to say, "I am 
Guzman, a grandee of Spain, who came to France to taste 

^ Wallon, Tribunal Rivolutionnaire, vol. iii. p. 155. 



262 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

liberty, but was arrested for theft ; " while the two Freys 
missed an historic occasion in not replying, "We are 
Julius and Emanuel Frey, sometime nobles of the Empire 
under the title of Von Schonfeld, now plain Jews em- 
ployed by the Emperor as spies." 

The public prosecutor read the indictment. First at 
great length Amar's report on the India Company. The 
details of the accusations which cost Fabre his life need 
not be entered into here. Suffice it to say that it was an 
indictment for corruption, for having suppressed or altered 
for money the decree of the Convention in the autumn 
before, and being accomplice in the extra gains which this 
had made possible — one of those wretched businesses with 
which Panama and South Africa have deluged modern 
France and England. It is an example of the methods of 
the tribunal that Fouquier managed to drag in Desmou- 
lins's name because he had once said, " People complain 
of not being able to make money now, yet I make it 
easily enough." 

The second group, the Freys, Guzman, the unfrocked 
priest D'Espagnac, and Diederichsen the Dane, were 
accused of being foreigners working against the success 
of the French armies, and at the same time lining their 
pockets. In the case of three of them the accusation was 
probably true. It was the more readily believed from the 
foreign origins of the accused, for France was full of spies, 
while the name of a certain contumacious Baron de Bartz 
made this list sound the more probable. 

Finally, the small group at which they were really aim- 
ing (whose members they had already mixed up with the 
thieves) was indicted on nothing more particular than the 
report of St. Just — virtually, that is, on Robespierre's notes. 
Danton had served the King, had drawn the people into the 
place where they were massacred in July 1791, did not 
do his duty on the i oth of August, and so forth — a vapid 
useless summary of impossible things in which no one 



THE DEATH OF DANTON 263 

but perhaps St. Just and a group of fanatics believed. 
With that the day ended, and they were taken back to 
prison. 

On the next day, the 14th Germinal (3rd of April 
1794), Westermann, who, though already arrested, had 
only been voted upon in Parliament the day before, 
appeared on the prisoners' bench, and sat at the end after 
Emanuel Frey. He was the last and not the least noble 
of the Dantonists, with his great stature, his clumsy in- 
tellect, and his loyal Teutonic blood. 

" Who are you ? " they said. " I am Westermann. 
Show me to the people. I was a soldier at sixteen, and 
have been a councillor of Strasbourg. I have seven 
wounds in front, and I was never stabbed in the back 
till now." 

This was the man who had led the loth of August, 
and who had dared, in his bluff nature, to parley with the 
Swiss who spoke his language. 

It was after some little time pased in the interrogation 
of the prisoners who had been arrested for fraud, especially 
of D'Espagnac, that the judge turned to Danton. 

In the debate and cross-questioning that followed we 
must depend mainly upon the notes of Lebrun,^ for they 
are more living, although they are more disconnected, than 
the official report. We discover in them the passionate 
series of outbursts, but a series which one must believe to 
have had a definite purpose. There was neither hope of 
convincing the tribunal nor of presenting a legal argument 
with effect. What Danton was trying to do in this court, 
which was not occupied with a trial, but merely in a 
process of condemnation, was to use it as a rostrum from 
which he could address the people, the general public, 

^ See Appendix X. The speeches which I have written here are 
reconstructed from these notes, and I must beg the reader to check the 
consecutive sentences of the text by reference to the disjointed notea 
printed in the Appendix. 



264 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

upon whose insurrection he depended. He perhaps de- 
pended also on the jury, for, carefully chosen as they were, 
they yet might be moved by a man who had never failed 
to convince by his extraordinary power of language. He 
carries himself exactly as though he were technically what 
he is in fact — a prisoner before an informal group of exe- 
cutioners, who appeals for justice to the crowd. 

He pointed at Cambon, who had sat by him on the 
Committee, and said, " Come now, Cambon, do you think 
we are conspirators ? Look, he is laughing ; he believes 
no such thing." Then he turned, laughing himself, to 
the jury and said, "Write down in your notes that he 
laughed." 

Again, he uses phrases like these : " We are here for 
a form, but if we are to have full liberty to speak, and if 
the French people is what it should be, it will be my 
business later to ask their pardon for my accusers." To 
which Camille answered, " Oh, we shall be allowed to 
speak, and that is all we want," and the group of Indul- 
gents laughed heartily. 

It was just after this that he began that great harangue 
in answer to the questions of the judge, an effort whose 
tone reaches to this day. It is, perhaps, the most striking 
example of a personal appeal that can be discovered. The 
opportunities for such are rare, for in the vast majority of 
historical cases where a man has pleaded for his life, it 
has either been before a well- organised court, or before a 
small number of determined enemies, or by the lips of 
one who was paid for his work and who ignored the art 
of political oratory. The unique conditions of the French 
Eevolution made such a scene possible, perhaps for the 
only time in history. 

The day, early as was the season, was warm, the 
windows of the court, that looked upon the Seine, were 
open, and through the wide doors pressed the head of a 
great crowd. This crowd stretched out along the corridor, 



THE DEATH OF DANTON 265 

along the quays, across the Pont Neuf, and even to the 
other side of the river. Every sentence that told was 
repeated from mouth to mouth, and the murmurs of the 
crowd proved how closely the great tribune was followed. 
In the attitude which had commanded the attention of 
his opponents when he presented the first deputation 
from Paris three years before, and that had made him 
so striking a figure during the stormy months of 1793, 
he launched the phrases that were destined for Paris 
and not for his judges. His loud voice (the thing ap- 
pears incredible, but it is true) vibrating through the 
hall and lifted to the tones that had made him the 
orator of the open spaces, rang out and was heard beyond 
the river. 

" You say that I have been paid, but I tell you that 
men made as I am cannot be paid. And I put against 
your accusation — of which you cannot furnish a proof nor 
the hint of a proof, nor the shadow nor the beginning of 
a witness — the whole of my revolutionary career. It was 
I who from the Jacobins kept Mirabeau at Paris. I have 
served long enough, and my life is a burden to me, but I 
will defend myself by telling you what I have done. It was 
I who made the pikes rise suddenly on the 20th of June 
and prevented the King's voyage to St. Cloud. The day 
after the massacre of the Champ de Mars a warrant was 
out for my arrest. Men were sent to kill me at Arcis, 
but my people came and defended me. I had to fly to 
London, and I came back, as you all know, the moment 
Garran was elected. Do you not remember me at the 
Jacobins, and how I asked for the Republic ? It was I 
who knew that the court was eager for war. It was I, 
among others, who denounced the policy of the war." 

Here a sentence was heard : " What did you do against 
the Brissotins ? " 

Now Danton had, as we knowi done all in his power 
to save the men who hated him, but whom he admired. 



266 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

It was no time for him to defend himself by an explana- 
tion of this in the ears of the people who had never under- 
stood, as he had, the height of the men who followed 
Vergnaud ; but he said what was quite true : " I told 
them that they were going to the scaffold. When I 
was a minister I said it to Brissot before the whole 
cabinet." 

He might have added that he had said to Guadet in 
the November woods on the night before he left for the 
army, " You are headstrong, and it will be your doom." ^ 

Then he went back again to the list of his services. 
" It was I who prepared the i oth of August. You say I 
went to Arcis. I admit it, and I am proud of it. I went 
there to pass three days, to say good-bye to my mother, 
and to arrange my affairs, because I was shortly to be in 
peril. I hardly slept that night. It was I that had Man- 
dat killed, because he had given the order to fire on the 
people. . . . You are reproaching me with the friendship 
of Fabre D'Eglantine. He is still my friend; and I still 
say that he is a good citizen as he sits here with me. 
You have told me that my defence has been too violent, 
you have recalled to me the revolutionary names, and you 
have told me that Marat when he appeared before the 
tribunal might have served as my model. Well, with 
regard to those names who were once my friends, I will 
tell you this : Marat had a character on fire and unstable ; 
Robespierre I have known as a man, above all, tenacious ; 
but I — I have served in my own fashion, and I would 
embrace my worst enemy for the sake of the country, and 
I will give her my body if she needs the sacrifice." 

This short and violent speech, which I have attempted 
to reproduce from the short, disjointed, ill-spelt notes of 
Lebrun, hit the mark. The crowd, the unstable crowd, 
which he contemned as he passed to the guillotine, moved 
like water under a strong wind ; and his second object also 

^ See p. 199. 



THE DEATH OF DANTON 267 

was readied, for the tribunal grew afraid. These phrases 
would soon be repeated in the Convention, and no means 
had been taken to silence that terrible voice. The Presi- 
dent of the court said to him that it was the part of an 
accused man to defend himself with proofs and not with 
rhetoric. He parried that also with remarkable skill, say- 
ing in a much quieter tone which all his friends (they 
were now growing in number) immediately noted : " That 
a man should be violent is wrong in him I know, unless 
it is for the public good, and such a violence has often 
been mine. If I exceeded now, it was because I found 
myself accused with such intolerable injustice." He raised 
his voice somewhat again with the words, " But as for 
you, St. Just, you will have to answer to posterity," and 
then was silent. 

When the unhappy man who had taken upon his 
shoulders the vile duty of the political work that day, 
when Herman was himself upon his trial, he said, " Re- 
member that this affair was out of the ordinary, and was 
a political trial," when a voice rose from the court, 
" There are no political trials under a Republic." He 
would have done well, obscure as he is before history, to 
have saved his own soul by refusing a task which he 
knew to involve injustice from beginning to end. 

It was at the close of that day that three short notes 
passed between Herman and the public prosecutor, 
Fouquier-Tinville. Herman wrote, " In half an hour I 
shall stop Danton's defence. You must spin out some of 
the rest in detail." Tinville answered, "I have some- 
thing more to say to Danton about Belgium ; " and Her- 
man replied, " Do not bring it in with regard to any of 
the others." This little proof of villany, which has sur- 
vived by so curious an accident (it is in the Archives to- 
day),-^ closed the proceedings of that hearing. 

^ Wallon, Tribunal Rivolutionnaire, iii. 169, quotes Archives, W. 342, 
Dossier 641, ist Part, No. 34. 



268 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

The next day, the 15 th of Germinal (4 th April), 
Danton himself said little. It was given over mainly to 
the examination of Desmoulins ; and as with Danton it 
had been rumours or opinions, so with Desmoulins only 
the vague sense of things he had written were brought in 
to serve as evidence in this tragic farce. 

Fouquier, the distant cousin of Camille, to whom he 
owed the post in which he was earning his bread by 
crime,^ tried to put something of complaint against the 
nation and of hatred to the Eepublic into his reading 
of the Old Cordelier. Even in his thin unpleasant voice 
there was only heard the noble phrase of Tacitus, and — it 
is a singular example of what the tribunal had become — 
they dared not continue the quotation because every 
word roused the people in the court. But Camille, so 
great with the pen, had nothing of the majesty or the 
strength of Danton. His defence was a weak, disconnected 
excuse, and, like all men who are insufficient to them- 
selves, he was inconsistent. 

H^rault made on that same day a far finer reply. 
Noble by birth, holding by his traditions and memories to 
that society which he himself had helped to destroy, and 
of which Talleyrand has said, " Those who have not known 
it have not lived ; " accustomed from his very first youth 
to prominence in his profession and to the favour of the 
court, he remained to the last full of contempt for so 
much squalor, and he veiled his eyes with pride. 

"I understand nothing of this topsy-turvydom. I 
was a diplomat, and I made the neutrality of Switzerland, 
so saving 60,000 men to the Republic. As for the priest 
you talk about, who was guillotined in my absence at 
Troyes, I knew him well. He was a Canon, if I remember, 

^ Fouquier had written a letter to his distant relative Desmoulins, 
begging for some employment, on August 20, 1 792, just after the success 
of Danton's party, in which Desmoulins had of course shared. It is by no 
means dignified and almost servile. See Claretie, Desmoulins, English 
edition, p. 318. 



THE DEATH OF DANTON 269 

and by no means a reactionary. You are probably joking 
about it. It is true be bad not taken the oatb, but be 
was a good man ; be helped me, and I am not ashamed 
of my friendship. I will tell you something more. On 
the 1 4th of July two men were killed, one on either side 
of me." He might have added, " I was the second man 
to scale the Towers." 

It was not until the day's proceedings had been drawn 
out for a considerable time that a sentence was spoken, 
the full import of which was not understood at the time, 
but which was, as a fact, the first step - in those four 
months of irresponsibility and crime which are associated 
with the name of Robespierre, and which hang like a 
weight around the neck of the French nation. Lacroix 
had just said with a touch of legal phraseology, " I must 
insist that the witnesses whom I have demanded should 
be subpoenaed, and if there is any difficulty about this, I 
formally demand that the Convention shall be consulted 
in the matter ; " when the public prosecutor answered, 
" It is high time that this part of the trial, which has be- 
come a mere struggle, and which is a public scandal, 
should cease. I am about to write to the Convention 
to hear what it has to say, and its advice shall be exactly 
followed." 

Both the public prosecutor and the judge signed the 
letter. The first draft which Fouquier had drawn up was 
thought too strong, and it appears that Herman revised 
it.^ " Citoyens Repr^sentants, — There has been a storm 
in the hall since this day's proceedings began. The 
accused are calling for witnesses who are among your 
deputies. : . They are appeaHng to the people, saying 
that they will be refused. In spite of the firmness of the 
president and of all the tribunal, they continue to pro- 
test that they will not be silent antil their witnesses are 

^ This is M. Wallon's opinion, who gives both versions, and from whom 
I take so much of this description. See Tribunal Revolutionnaire, iii. 177. 



270 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

heard, unless by your passing a special decree." [This was 
false, and was the only part of the letter calculated to 
impress the Parliament.] " We wish to hear your orders 
as to what we shall do in the face of this demand ; the 
procedure gives us no way by which we can refuse 
them." 

But note the way in which the letter was presented to 
a Parliament in which there yet remained so much sym- 
pathy for the accused, and the way in which it was 
received. St. Just appeared in the tribune with the letter 
in his hands, and, instead of reading it, held it up before 
them and made this speech : — 

" The public prosecutor of the Kevolutionary Tribunal 
has sent to tell you that the prisoners are in full revolt, 
and have interrupted the hearing, saying they will not 
allow it to continue until the Convention has taken 
measures. You have barely escaped from the greatest 
danger which has yet menaced our new liberty, and this 
revolt in the very seat of justice, of men panic-stricken 
by the law, shows what is in their minds. Their despair 
and their fury are a plain proof of the hypocrisy which 
they showed in keeping a good face before you. Innocent 
men do not revolt. Dillon, who ordered his army to 
march on Paris, has told us that Desmoulins's wife received 
money to help the plot. Our thanks are due to you for 
having put us in the difficult and dangerous post that we 
occupy. Your Committees will answer you by the most 
careful watching," and so forth. When the Convention 
had had laid before them every argument and every 
flattery which could falsify their point of view, he proposed 
the decree that any prisoner who should attempt to 
interrupt the course of justice by threats or revolt should 
be outlawed. 

As they were about to vote, Billaud Varennes added 
his word, " I beg the Convention to listen to a letter 
which the Committees have received from the police con- 



THE DEATH OF DANTON 271 

cerning tlie conspirators, and their connection witli tlie 
prisoners." Tlie letter is not genuine. Even if it were, 
it depends entirely upon tlie word of one obscure and un- 
trustworthy man (Laflotte), but it did the work. The 
Committees, as we know, were names to conjure with. 
Their secret debates, their evident success, the fact that 
their members had been chosen for the very purpose of 
guarding the interests of the Republic, all fatally told 
against the prisoners. The decree passed without a vote. 
Robespierre asked that the letter might be read in full 
court, and his demand was granted. It was from that 
letter, from this obscure and uncertain origin, that there 
dated the legend of the " conspiracy in the prisons " 
which was to cost the lives of so many hundreds. 

It was at the very close of this day, the 4th of April, 
that the decree of the Convention was brought back to 
the tribunal. A mar brought it and gave it to Fouquier, 
saying, " Here is what you wanted." Fouquier smiled and 
said, " We were in great need of it." It was read in the 
tribunal. When Camille heard the name of his wife 
mentioned in connection with St. Just's demand he cried 
out, " Will they kill her too ? " and David, who was sitting 
behind the judges, said, "We hold them at last."^ 

The fourth day, the i6th Germinal (5 th April), the 
court met at half-past eight in the morning, instead of at 
the ordinary hour of ten. Almost at once, before the 
accused had time to begin their tactics of the day before, 
the decree was read. The judge, reljdng on the law w^hich 
had already been in operation against others, and which 
gave the jury the right to say after three days whether 
they were satisfied, turned to them, and they asked leave 
to deliberate. 

Before the prisoners had passed into the prison Des- 
moulins had found time to tear the defence which he had 
written into small pieces, and to throw them at the feet 

^ AH this appears in the trial of Fouquier. 



272 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

of the judge. Danton cried out, and checked himself in 
the middle of his sentence. All save poor Camille had 
kept their self-control. He, however, clung to the dock, 
determined on making some appeal to the people, or to 
the judges, or to posterity. Danton, who calmed him a 
few hours later at the foot of the scaffold, could do no- 
thing with him then, and it was in the midst of a terrible 
violence that the fifteen disappeared. 

The prisoners were taken back to the Conciergerie, 
but in their absence occurred a scene which is among the 
most instructive of the close of the Kevolution. One of 
the jury could not bring himself to declare the guilt of 
men whom he knew to be innocent. Another said to 
him, " This is not a trial ; it is a sacrifice. Danton and 
Kobespierre cannot exist together; which do you think 
most necessary to the Kepublic ? " The unhappy man, 
full of the infatuation of the time, stammered out, " Why, 

Eobespierre is necessary, of course, but " " It is 

enough ; in saying that you have passed judgment." 
And it came about in this way that the unanimous 
verdict condemned the Indulgents. Lhuillier alone was 
acquitted. 

Of what passed in the prison we only know from the 
lips of an enemy,^ but I can see Danton talking still 
courageously of a thousand things; sitting in his chair 
of green damask and drinking his bottle of Burgundy 
opposite the silver and the traps of D'Eglantine.^ They 
were not taken back to hear their sontence ; it was read 
to them, as a matter of form, in the Conciergerie itself. 
Ducray read it to them one by one as they were brought 
into his office. Danton refused to hear it in patience ; 
he hated the technicality and the form, and he knew 
that he was condemned long ago. He committed himself 
to a last burst of passion before summoning his strength 

^ They are given in Clar^tie's JDesmoulins in the Appendix. 
* See the list of the prisoner's effects in Claretie's Besmoidins . 



THE DEATH OF DANTON 273 

to meet the ordeal of tlie streets, and followed his anger 
by the insults which for days he had levelled at death. 
Then for a few hours they kept a silence not undignified, 
save only Camille, unfitted for such trials, and moaning 
to himself in a corner of the room, whom Danton con- 
tinually tried to console, a task in which at the very end 
of their sad journey he succeeded. It was part of his 
broad mind to understand even a writer and an artist, he 
who had never written and had only done. 

It was between half-past four and five o'clock in the 
evening of the same day, the 5th of April 1794, that the 
prisoners reappeared. Two carts were waiting for them 
at the great gate in the court of the Palais — the gate 
which is the inner entrance to the Conciergerie to-day.^ 
About the carts were a numerous escort mounted and 
with drawn swords, but the victims took their seats as 
they chose, and of the fifteen the Dantonists remained 
together. Herault, Camille, Lacroix, Westermann, Fabre, 
Danton went up the last into the second cart, and the 
procession moved out of the courtyard and turned to the 
left under the shadow of the Palais, and then to the left 
again round the Tour de I'Horloge, and so on to the quay. 
They passed the window of the tribunal, the window from 
which Danton's loud voice had been heard across the 
river ; they went creaking slowly past the old Mairie, past 
the rooms that had been Roland's lodgings, till they 
came to the corner of the Pont Neuf ; and as the carts 
turned from the trees of the Place Dauphine on to the 
open bridge, they left the shade and passed into the full 
blaze of the westering sun within an hour of its setting. 

Early as was the season, the air was warm and 
pleasant, the leaves and the buds were out on the few 
trees, the sky was unclouded. All that fatal spring was 
summerlike, and this day was the calmest and most 

^ This gate may be seen to-day just to the right of the great staircase 
in the court of the Palais de Justice. It has an iron grating before it. 

S 



274 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

beautiful that it had known. The light, already tinged 
with evening, came flooding the houses of the north bank 
till their glass shone in the eyes. There it caught the 
Caf^ de r^cole where Danton had sat a J'^oung lawyer 
seven years before, and had seen the beauty of his first 
wife in her father's house ; to the right the corner of the 
old Hotel de Ville caught the glow, to the left the Louvre 
flamed with a hundred windows. 

Where the light poured up the river and came re- 
flected from the Seine on to the bridge, it marked out the 
terrible column that was moving ponderously forward to 
death, A great crowd, foolish, unstable, varied, of whom 
some sang, some ran to catch a near sight of the " Indul- 
gents," some pitied, and a few understood and despaired 
of the Eepublic — all these surging and jostling as a 
crowd will that is forced to a slow pace and confined by 
the narrowness of an old thoroughfare, stretched from 
one end of the bridge to the other, and you would have 
seen them in the sunlight, brilliant in the colours that 
men wore in those days, while here and there a red cap 
of liberty marked the line of heads. 

But in the centre of this crowd and showing above it, 
could be seen the group of men who were about to die. 
The carts hidden by the people, the horses' heads just 
showing above the mob, surrounded by the sharp gleams 
that only come from swords, there rose distinguished the 
figures of the Dantonists. There stood Herault de 
Sechelles upright, his face contemptuous, his colour high, 
" as though he had just risen from a feast." There on 
the far side of the cart sat Fabre D'Eglantine, bound, ill, 
collapsed, his head resting on his chest, muttering and 
complaining. There on the left side, opposite Fabre, 
is Camille, bound but still frenzied, calling loudly to the 
people, raving, " Peuple, pauvre Peuple ! " He still kept 
in his poet's head the dream of the People ! They had 
been deceived, but they were just, they would save him. 



THE DEATH OF DANTON 275 

He wrestled witli his ropes and tore his shirt open at the 
bosom, clenching his bound hands — clutched in his 
fingers through all the struggle shone the bright hair of 
Lucille. Danton stood up immense and quiet between 
them. One of those broad shoulders touched D'Egiantine, 
the other Desmoulins ; their souls leant upon his body. 
And such comfort as there was or control in the central 
group came out like warmth from the chief of these 
friends. 

He had been their leader and their strength for five 
years ; they were round him now like younger brothers 
orphaned. The weakness of one, the vices of another, 
came leaning for support on the great rock of his form. 
For these were not the Girondins, the admirable stoics, of 
whom each was a sufficient strength to his own soul : 
they were the Dantonists, who had been moulded and 
framed by the strength and genius of one man. He did 
not fail them a moment in the journey, and he died last 
to give them courage. 

As they passed on and left the river, they lost the 
light again and plunged into shadow; the cool air was 
about them in the deep narrow streets. They could see 
the light far above them only, as they turned into the 
gulf of the Kue St. Honor^ down which the lives of men 
poured like a stream to be lost and wasted in the Place de 
la Kevolution. Up its steep sides echoed and re-echoed 
the noise of the mob like waves. They could see as they 
rolled slowly along the people at the windows, the men 
sitting in the cafes or standing up to watch them go by. 
One especially Danton saw suddenly and for a moment. 
He was standing with a drawing-book in his hand and 
sketching rapidly with short interrupted glances. It was 
David, an enemy. 

Then there appeared upon their left another sight; 
it was the only one in that long hour which drove 
Danton out of his control : it was the house of Duplay. 



276 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

There, hidden somewhere behind the close shutters, was 
Robespierre, They all turned to it loudly, and the 
sentence was pronounced which some say God has 
executed — that it should disappear and not be known 
again, and be hidden by high walls and destroyed. 

The house was silent, shut, blockaded. It was like a 
thing which is besieged and which turns its least sentient 
outer part to its enemies. It was beleaguered by the 
silent and unseen forces which we feel pressing every- 
where upon the living. For it contained the man who 
had sent that cartload of his friends to death. Their 
fault had been to preach the permanent sentiments of 
mankind, to talk of mercy, and to recall in 1794 the 
great emotions of the early Revolution — the desire for 
the Republic where every kind of man could sit and 
laugh at the same table, the Republic of the Commensales. 
They were the true heirs of the spirit of the Federations, 
and it was for this that they were condemned. Even at 
this last moment there radiated from them the warmth 
of heart that proceeds from a group of friends and lovers 
till it blesses the whole of a nation with an equal affection. 
Theirs had been the instinct of and the faith in the happy 
life of the world. It was for this that the Puritan had 
struck them down; and yet it is the one spirit that 
runs through any enduring reform, the only spirit that 
can lead us at last to the Republic. 

In a remote room, where the noise of the wheels 
could not reach him, sat the man who, by some fatal 
natural lack or some sin of ambition unrepented, had 
become the Inquisitor — the mad, narrow enemy of mercy 
and of all good things. 

For a moment he and his error had the power to 
condemn, repeating a tragedy of which the world is never 
weary — the mean thing was killing the great. 

Nevertheless, if you will consider the men in the 
tumbril, you will find them not to be pitied except for 



THE DEATH OF DANTON 277 

two things, that they were loved by women whom they 
could not see, and that they were dying in the best and 
latest time of their powerful youth. All these young 
men were loved, and in other things they should be 
counted fortunate. They had with their own persons 
already transformed the world. Here the writer knew 
that his talent, the words he had so carefully chosen and 
with such delight in his power, had not been wasted 
upon praise or fortune, but had achieved the very object. 
There the orator knew and could remember how his 
great voice had called up the armies and thrown back 
the kings. 

But if the scene was a tragedy, it was a tragedy of 
the real that refused to follow the unities. All nature 
was at work, crowded into the Revolutionary time, and 
the element that Shakespeare knew came in of itself — tho 
eternal comedy that seems to us, according to our mood, 
the irony, the madness, or the cruelty of things, was 
fatally present to make the day complete ; and the 
grotesque, like a discordant note, contrasted with and 
emphasised the terrible. 

Fabre, who had best known how omnipresent is this 
complexity — Fabre, who had said, "Between the giving 
and taking of snuff there is a comedy" — furnished the 
example now. Danton hearing so much weakness and 
so many groans from the sick man said, " What is your 
complaint ? " He answered, " I have written a play 
called ' The Maltese Orange,' and I fear the police have 
taken it, and that some one will steal it and get the 
fame." Poor Fabre ! It is lost, and no one has the 
ridicule of his httle folly. Danton answered him with a 
phrase to turn the blood : " Tais toi ! Dans une semaine 
tu feras assez de vers," and imposed silence. Nor did 
this satisfy Fate ; there were other points in the frame- 
work of the incongruous which she loves to throw round 
terror. A play was running in the opera called the 



278 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

" loth of August;" in tliis the Dantonists were repre- 
sented on the stage. When the Dantonists were hardly 
buried it was played agaiu that very night, and actors 
made up for Herault and the rest passed before a public 
that ignored or had forgotten what the afternoon had 
seen. More than this, there was already set in type a 
verse which the street-hawkers cried and sold that very 
night. For the sake of its coincidence I will take the 
liberty of translating it into rhymed heroics : — 

" When Danton, Desmoulins, and D'Eglantine 
Were ferried over to the world unseen, 
Charon, that equitable citizen, 
Handed their change to these distinguished men. 
' Pray keep the change,' they cried ; ' we pay the fare 
For Couthon, and St, Just, and Eohespierre.' " ^ 

Danton spared only Camille, and as he did not stop 
appealing to the people, told him gently to cease. " Leave 
the rabble there," he said, " leave them alone." But for 
himself he kept on throwing angry jests at death. " May 
I sing ? " he said to the executioner. Sanson thought 
he might, for all he knew. Then Danton said to him, 
" I have made some verses, and I will sing them." He 
sang loudly a verse of the fall of Robespierre, and then 
laughed as though he had been at the old caf^ with 
his friends. 

There was a man (Arnault of the Academy) who 
lived afterwards to a great age, and who happened to be 

^ The original of this I take from Clar^tie, who quotes P. A. Lecomte, 
Memor'ial sur la Revolution Frangaise. 

" Lorsqu'arriv^s au bords du 'Ph\6g6ton 
Camille Desmoulins, D'Eglantine et Danton, 
Payerent pour passer ce fleuve redouatble 
Le nautonnier Charon (citoyen Equitable) 
A nos trois passagers voulait remettre en mains 
L'exc^dant de la taxe imposee aux humains. 
* Garde,' lui dit Danton, ' la somme toute entifere ; 
Je paye pour Couthon, St. Just et Robespierre.' " 



THE DEATH OF DANTON 279 

crossing the Kue St. Honor^ as the carts went past. In 
a Paris that had all its business to do, many such men 
came and went, almost forgetting that politics existed 
even then. But this batch of prisoners haunted him. 
He had seen Danton standing suigihg with laughter, he 
hurried on to the Rue de la Monnaie, had his say with 
Michael, who was awaiting him, and then, full of the 
scene, ran back across the Tuilleries gardens, and pressing 
his face to the railings looked over the great Place de la 
Revolution. The convoy had arrived, the carts stood at 
the foot of the guillotine, and his memory of the scene is 
the basis of its history. 

It was close on six, and the sun was nearly set behind 
the trees of the ^fitoile; it reddened the great plaster 
statue of Liberty which stood in the middle of the Place, 
where the obelisk is now, and to which Madame Roland 
delivered her last phrase. It sent a level beam upon the 
vast crowd that filled the square, and cast long shadows, 
sending behind the guillotine a dark lane over the people. 
The day had remained serene and beautiful to the last, 
the sky was stainless, and the west shone like a forge, 
Agauist it, one by one, appeared the figures of the con- 
demned. Herault de S^chelles, straight and generous in 
his bearing, first showed against the light, standing on 
the high scaffold conspicuous. He looked at the Garde 
Meuble, and from one of its high windows a woman's hand 
found it possible to wave a farewell. Lacroix next, 
equally alone; Camille, grown easy and self-controlled, 
was the third. One by one they came up the few steps, 
stood clearly for a moment in the fierce light, black or 
framed in scarlet, and went down. 

Danton was the last. He had stood unmoved at the 
foot of the steps as his friends died. Trying to embrace 
Herault before he went up, roughly rebuking the execu- 
tioner who tore them asunder, waiting his turn without 
passion, he heard the repeated fall of the knife in the 



28o THE LIFE OF DANTON 

silence of the crowd. His great figure, more majestic 
than in the days of his triumph, came against the sunset. 
The man who watched it from the Tuilleries gate grew 
half afraid, and tells us that he understood for a moment 
what kind of things Dante himself had seen. By an 
accident he had to wait some seconds longer than the 
rest ; the executioner heard him muttering, " I shall never 
see her again ... no weakness," but his only movement 
was to gaze over the crowd. They say that a face met 
his, and that a sacramental hand was raised in absolution.^ 
He stood thus conspicuous for a moment over the 
people whom he had so often swayed. In that attitude 
he remains for history. When death suddenly strikes a 
friend, the picture which we carry of him in our minds is 
that of vigorous life. His last laughter, his last tones of 
health, his rapid step, or his animated gesture reproduce 
his image for ever. So it is with Danton; there is no 
mask of Danton dead, nor can you complete his story 
with the sense of repose. We cannot see his face in the 
calm either of triumph or of sleep — the brows grown level, 
the lips satisfied, the eyelids closed. He will stand 
through whatever centuries the story of the Kevolution 
may be told as he stood on the scaffold looking west- 
ward and transfigured by the red sun, still courageous, 
still powerful in his words, and still instinct with that 
peculiar energy, self-forming, self-governing, and whole. 
He has in his final moment the bearing of the tribune, 
the glance that had mastered the danger in Belgium, the 
force that had nailed Koland to his post in September, 
and that had commanded the first Committee. The 
Republic that he desired, and that will come, was proved 
in his carriage, and passed from him into the crowd. 

^ It was Madame Gdly who told this to Despoi's grandfather. Clar^tie 
has mentioned it. But Michelet must have heard from the family about 
this same priest (Ker^navant le Breton), for according to Madame G^ly it 
was he who married Danton for the second time. 



THE DEATH OF DANTON 281 

When Sanson put a hand upon his shoulder the 
ghost of Mirabeau stood by his side and inspired him 
with the pride that had brightened the death-chamber 
of three years before. He said, " Show my head to the 
people ; it is well worth the while." Then they did what 
they had to do, and without any kind of fear, his great 
soul went down the turning in the road. 

They showed his head to the people, and the sun set. 
There rose at once the confused noise of a thousand 
voices that rejoiced, or questioned, or despaired, and 
in the gathering darkness the Parisians returned through 
the narrow streets eastward to their homes. 



CHAPTER VIII 

ROBESPIERRE 

I DESIEE in this additional chapter to show what place 
Danton filled in the Revolution by describing the mad- 
ness and the reaction that followed his loss ; and the 
extent to which his influence, in spite of these, was per- 
manent. 

When Danton disappeared, one man remained the 
master of the terrible machine which he had created. It 
remains to show what were the fortunes of his work when 
death had come to complete the results of his abdication. 

The genius of the dead man had foreseen a necessity, 
had met it with an institution, and that institution had 
proved his wisdom by its immense success. France was 
one within, and was beginning on her frontiers the war 
whose success was not to end until it had rebuilt all 
Europe. This unprecedented power dominated a country 
long used to centralisation, and was strengthened by the 
accidents of the time, by the even play of the government 
over a surface where all local obstacles had broken down, 
by the tacit acquiescence of every patriotic man (for it 
was the thing that saved the nation), by the very abuse 
of punitive measures. This power was destined to change 
from a machine to a toy. 

They say the children of that time had little models 
of the guillotine to play with. The statement is pic- 
turesque and presumably false, but it will serve well for a 
simile. A man unused to action, dreaming of a perfect 
state which was but a reflection of his own intensely 



ROBESPIERRE 283 

concentrated mind, acquired the control of the guillotine. 
Unfortunately the model was of full size. 

The punishment of death had hitherto been inflicted, 
for the most part, with a clear and definite, though often 
with an immoral, object. In the hands of Robespierre it 
was used to defend a theory and a whim. The men of 
the time loved their country ardently, and believed with 
the firmness of a large and generous faith in those prin- 
ciples upon which all our civilisation is at present based. 
France and the Republic were, in their minds, one thing, 
and a thing which they spared no means to make survive 
the most terrible struggle into which any nation has ever 
dared to enter. They killed that they might be obeyed 
in a time which verged on anarchy, and they desired to 
be obeyed because, but for obedience to government, 
France and all her liberties would have perished. Such 
a motive for punishment is just, and its execution is 
honest. 

By the side of this and beyond it were the excesses, 
those excesses in protest against which Danton himself 
had died. Execrable as were these, infamous as will ever 
remain their most conspicuous actors, Hebert and Carrier, 
they were prompted by a motive which is of the com- 
monest and the most easily understood in human affairs. 
They were actions of revenge. Danton had said once 
and sincerely, " I can find no use for hate." It was the 
key to his successful effort, by far the most creative in a 
time when all was energy, that no part of his strength 
was lost in personal attack, hardly any in personal defence. 
This could no more be said of his contemporaries than it 
can be said of the bulk of men in any nation, even in 
times of order and of peace. And everywhere, in Nantes, 
in Lyons, in the Vendee, in the accusation of Marie 
Antoinette, from the very beginning of the Terror, this 
hate had surged and broken. The Girondins were put to 
death on a charge full of the spirit of revenge ; and as the 



284 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

autumn grew into winter, in tlie very crisis of that oppres- 
sion by which the nation had been saved, the accusations 
became trivial, the process of justice more and more of a 
personal act, depending in the provinces on the temper of 
an emissary, in Paris upon the summary judgment of the 
Committee and the Tribunal. 

But all this had so far been comprehensible. With 
the advent of Kobespierre to full power we have to deal 
with a phase of history which will hardly be understood 
in happier times. Danton, who saw straight, who under- 
stood, and who, when the victories began, found leisure to 
pity, is a type whose extremes are the romance, whose 
moderation is the groundwork of history. We have to 
deal in him with an enthusiast who is also a statesman, in 
whom the mind has sufficient power to know itseK even 
in its violence, and to return deliberately within its usual 
boundaries after never so fantastic an excursion. With 
Hubert again we know the type. Those are not rare in 
whom passions purely personal dominate all abstract con- 
ceptions, and whose natures desire the horrible in litera- 
ture during times of peace, and satisfy their desire by 
action during their moments of power. 

But with Kobespierre an absolutely different feature 
is presented : the man who could laugh and the man 
who could hate, the right and the left wing have dis- 
appeared, and there is left standing alone a personahty 
which had gradually become the idol of the city. He 
could neither laugh nor hate ; the love of country itself, 
which illuminates so much in the Revolution, and which 
explains so many follies in the smaller men, even that was 
practically absent in the mind of Robespierre. His char- 
acter would have fitted well with the absence of the 
human senses, and should some further document discover 
to historians that he lacked the sense of taste, that he was 
colour-blind, or that he could not distinguish the notes of 
music, these details would do much to complete the im- 



ROBESPIERRE 285 

perfect and troubling picture. For in the sphere that is 
above, but co-ordinate with, physical life, all those avenues 
by which our fellow-beings touch us more nearly than 
ideas were closed to him. 

It is possible that he may take, centuries hence, the 
appearance of majesty. He had the reserve, the dignity, 
the intense idealism, the perfect belief in himself, the 
certitude that others were in sympathy — all the charac- 
teristics, in fine, which distinguish the Absolutists and the 
great Reformers. In his iron code of theory we seem to 
hear the ghost of a Calvin, in his reiterated morals and 
his perpetual application of them there is the occasional 
sharp reminiscence of a Hildebrand. The famous death 
cry, " I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I 
die in exile," is not so far distant from " . . . de mourir 
pour le peuple et d'en etre abJiorre." 

We are accustomed to clothe such figures with a 
solemn drapery, and to lend them, at great distances of 
time, a certain terrible grandeur. Robespierre is too near 
us, he is too well known, and his reforms failed too utterly, 
for this to be now the case with him. Yet it may well 
happen that some one else treading in the same path, 
and succeeding, will see fit to build a legend round his 
name. 

What then was the ideal which he pursued — this 
" one idea," which stood so perpetually before him as to 
exclude the sight of all human things, of sufferings, of 
memories, of patriotism itself? It was the civic ideal of 
Eousseau, in so far as he conformed to it, and nothing 
more. 

The ideas of the great reformers must of their nature 
be simple— unworkably simple. But Robespierre's idea 
was less than simple — it was thin. Now and again in 
the history of upheavals a type has been defmed with 
special formulae, which in its original shape could never 
have survived the conditions of active existence, but which 



286 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

was real enougli to receive accretions, and robust enough 
to bear moulding until at length it became the living 
nucleus of a new society, changed, transformed in a 
thousand details, yet in its main lines the ideal of the 
founder. With all the great reforms of the world some 
such type has been present ; the Puritan, the knight of 
chivalry, were at first but a faint figure realised in a few 
phrases. 

Rousseau himself had created such a type, and it has 
survived ; for what permanent fortunes a century is insuffi- 
cient to show. The Republican citizen of Jean-Jacques 
stood in the generation which succeeded him the centre 
of a new society; in a thousand shapes he really lived. 
Thomas Jefferson, William Cobbett, were living men to 
whom this ideal stood for model ; not in its details, but in 
its main lines. Such noble men are to be met to-day on 
every side. 

But Robespierre saw reflected in his mind a figure at 
once more detailed and less human, and one too sharply 
defined to be capable of any moulding or of any trans- 
ference into the real world. For him this ideal citizen 
was nevertheless the one good thmg, the one sound basis 
of a State. This ideal citizen existed (did men only 
know it) in each individual ; all men could be made to 
approach the type ; only a very few were opposed to its 
success, and it was a sacred duty to break their criminal 
effort. The figure stood ever before him, it dominated 
his every thought, it was the sacred thing before which 
his essentially mystical mind was perpetually at worship. 
But he could see nothing beyond or on either side of it ; 
concrete impressions faded on the unhealthy retina of 
his mind. For there was a mirror held up before his 
eyes, and the figure on which he dwelt was himself. 

Thus intensely concentrated upon a certain individual 
type, it was in his nature to forget the reactions of a 
community. He saw in society a few evils prominent, 



ROBESPIERRE 287 

authority without warrant, arbitrary rule (that hateful 
thing), serviHty in the oppressed (the main impediment to 
any reform). He was bhnd to the interplay, the organic 
quality in a State, which our own time so ridiculously 
exaggerates, but which the eighteenth century as a whole 
neglected. Rousseau had put admirably the metaphor of 
contract as explaining the bond of society. Robespierre, 
interpreting him, conceived of contract as the simple and 
all-sufficient machinery of a State. The error gave his 
attempt a mechanical and an inhuman appearance over 
and above its rigidity of dogma. Rousseau, like all the 
great writers, gave continual glimpses of the insufficiency 
of language ; he let his audience see in a hundred phrases, 
in a recurrence of qualifications, that his words were no 
more than the words of others, hints at realities, at the 
best metaphors brought as near as possible to be the true 
reflection of ideas. Robespierre read him, and has re- 
mained among the words entangled and satisfied. Rous- 
seau was perpetually insisting upon a point of view, calling 
out, " Come and see." He had discovered a position from 
which (as he thought) the bewildering complexity of 
human affairs appeared in a just and simple perspective. 
But Rousseau never asserts that such a view will have the 
same colouring to all men ; on the contrary, at his best 
he denies it. He trusts to the main aspect of his theory 
for a main result in the State, to an agreement among 
men of good- will for the harmonising of conflicting details. 
Robespierre, as the high-priest of that gospel, had come 
and had seen, but the perfect citizen and the perfect state 
of his vision must be realised in every tittle as he had 
observed them. Once again a great message was destined 
to be sterilised and almost lost through the functionary 
of its creed. 

Such was the man who had slowly supplanted Danton. 
A mind whose type of aberration is common to all nations 
had supplanted the typical Frenchman who had organised 



288 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

the defence of France, and in the place of one whom his 
enemies perpetually reproach with an excess of vigour 
and manhood, a theorist of hardly any but intellectual 
emotions was master. 

What gave him his great ascendancy, his practically 
absolute power ? It was due, in the first place, to the 
popularity whose growth was the feature of the later 
Revolution. That popularity was real in the number 
of his followers and in the sincerity of their profession. 
It must be remembered that hitherto he had stood on 
the side of leniency in public action, while in words he 
had expressed always accurately, sometimes nobly, the 
ideals upon which the nation was bent. He had, from a 
constitutional incapacity for real work, been only in the 
background of those crises which had left behind them 
an increasing crowd of malcontents. JSTot he, but Danton, 
had made the loth of August. No one had connected 
his name with the massacres of September. The neces- 
sity of government was not Ms interpretation of the 
defeats in Belgium ; the creation of that government was 
another's; its latent benefits reflect no merit upon him 
now; its immediate rigours exposed him to no special 
vengeance at the time. Not he, but Marat, is the obvious 
demagogue whom the visionary Girondin girl marks out 
as the enemy. To Carnot would turn the hatred of those 
whom the great conscription oppressed. The Christian 
foundation of France had others than Robespierre to 
curse for the Masque of Reason and for the suppression 
of public worship. He had stood behind Desmoulins 
when the reaction of Nivose and Frimaire was at work; 
he had approved and was thought the author of that trial 
and execution in which Hebert had suffered the sentence 
already pronounced upon him by the best of France. In 
fact, he had stood in nothing as the extremist or as the 
tyrant till the day when he permitted the arrest of 
Danton. He had been rather the voice of a strong public 



ROBESPIERRE 289 

opinion than tlie arm which, when it acts at the orders of 
unreason, becomes hated by its own furious master. Thus 
upon the negative side there was nothing to prevent his 
sudden attainment of power. 

In the second place, his name had been the most pre- 
sent and the most famihar from the earliest days of the 
Revolution. He had sat in the Assembly of the Com- 
mons five years before, a notable though hardly a noted 
figure, with some stories surrounding him, with quite a 
reputation in his provincial centre; he had been, since 
first the Jacobin Club became the mouthpiece of the pure 
Republicans, the conspicuous leader of the Society. The 
force of continuity and tradition counts for little in the 
history of this whirlwind, but such as it is it explains to 
a great degree the ascendancy of Robespierre. He alone 
was never absent, he alone remained to chant a ceaseless 
chorus to the action of the drama. His name was familiar 
to excess ; but it was hardly an epoch at which men grew 
weary of hearing a politician called " the just." Besides 
this famiHarity with his name, certain virtues — and those 
the most cherished of the time — were in fact or by repu- 
tation his. None could accuse him of venality ; his sin- 
cerity was obvious — indeed, it was the necessary fruit of 
his narrow mind. The ambition from which we cannot 
divorce his name was apparent to but few of his contem- 
poraries, and was not fully seized even by his enemies 
till he had started on that short career of absolute power 
which has stamped itself for ever upon the fortunes of 
his country. Thus habit, the strongest of forces, was 
his ally. 

In the third place, circumstances quite as much as 
his own action had left him (as far as one can follow the 
mysteries of the Committee) sole director of an excep- 
tional executive. On account of the illusions and neces- 
sities of the people such a position was not immediately 
recognised as tyrannical. The machine was theirs, working 

T 



290 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

for them and made by them; all the better if an idol 
of theirs held the levers ; he would make the most trusty 
of servants. Robespierre was not master in theory. Even 
committees were not the masters in theory. Theory was 
everything to France in the year II., and in theory the 
Convention was master. Nay, even the Convention was 
only master because — in theory again — the sovereign, 
the nation, was behind it. The majority of the Conven- 
tion, and it alone, is the technical authority, Robespierre's 
name was not to be discovered at the foot of those lists 
of the condemned which his monstrous policy constructed, 
and at the end of his four months he fell because the 
theoretical master, the Convention, acted as it chose, and 
no sufficient force dared to deny its right. 

He starts then upon the closing act of the play, the 
one figure whom all regard, and into whose hands the 
police, the committees, the juries, and (by their own dis- 
order) the majority of the Convention itself have fallen. 

The new reign began on the 6th of April, exactly a 
year to a day since the Committee of Public Safety had 
been established. It was Germinal, the month of 
seeds that grow under ground, the most significant and 
the most terrible of the new names. M. Zola has chosen 
it for the title of his greatest work ; it was the other day 
on the dying lips of a poor wretch in Spain whose mad- 
ness also turned upon social injustice. 

The following of Robespierre did not hesitate to show 
at once its tendencies and even its dogmas — for it held a 
religion. That same day, the 6th of April — 1 7th Ger- 
minal of the year II. — Couthon came from the Committee 
with a proposition for the Parliament to discuss the 
establishment of a national worship of God. A new note 
had been heard in the clamour ; soon in the clear silence 
of suspense it is to be the only sound, saving the dull 
accompaniment of the two guillotines. This or that 
occasional freak of theory or dramatised ribaldry the 



ROBESPIERRE 291 

Terror had already known ; unlimited power defended by- 
inexorable severity bad developed many strange decrees, 
dissociated from tbe general life and dying as they rose — ■ 
absurdities whose chief purpose would seem to be the 
interest they have afforded to foreigners. But in these 
there had been no system. The Mass was being said on 
all sides when the churches were supposed to be closed. 
Even as the Feast of Reason was being held at Notre 
Dame, vespers were chanted at St. Germains. One thing 
alone had been the purpose and had given the motive 
force to nine months of agony endured — the salvation 
of Revolutionary France. But when Couthon spoke it 
was not France, nor common rights and liberties which 
were proposed as the object of the defence — it was 
Robespierrian Rousseau. In two months we shall have 
the worship of the Supreme Being, in three the reaction ; 
in less than four the high-priest of this impossible system 
is to fall; yet his dream and his power will be almost 
enough in their fall to drag down the Republic. 

Five days more saw "the rest of the factions" sacri- 
ficed to this new personal terror. Gobel, who had always 
been afraid, and whose conscience had been turned like a 
weathercock away from the nearest pike; the wives of 
Desmoulins and of Hubert (for women, as the Terror 
increased, were suspected, sometimes rightly, of being the 
best at plotting) ; Chaumette, who had helped Hc'bert to 
put up his theatricals in Notre Dame — they were all 
tried, and in this trial it is again not the Revolution, but 
Robespierre pure and simple whom we hear arguing and 
condemning through the mouths of the court. 

One of the accused " has wished to efface the idea of 
the divinity." Another has " interfered with the worship 
of his fellow-citizens" (this was said to Chaumette, who 
must have thought it even at that moment something 
of a platitude). To a third the reproach is made of 
" changing the mode of worship without authority." We 



292 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

are on tlie higliroad to those last six weeks in whicli 
trial of any kind and definite accusation itself was absent. 
The details of one man's opinion are become the num- 
berless dogmas of a creed, and of a creed that kills 
unmercifully. And yet even as he asserted his creed its 
mechanical impotence appeared in violent contrast with 
the humanity that the Puritan was persecuting. For 
Lucille lighted her face radiantly when she was condemned, 
and said, " I shall see him in a few hours." 

Three days more — the 17 th of April — and the 
machinery was further centralised. St. Just demanded 
that the pohtical prisoners should be taken from every 
part of France to be judged in Paris. The popular com- 
missions — mere gatherings to denounce without proofs 
and without forms — were actively used all over the 
Eepublic. In Paris the commission was to be the feeler 
for the central machine. And such was the incapacity 
of the Dreamer, " who had not wits enough to cook an 
egg," that this new feature in the machinery was not even 
organised : it was a government of mere rigid absolutism 
resting on bases that were rapidly becoming mere anarchy. 
But even as the system, such as it was, developed, as the 
central power grew more rigid, and the thing to be 
governed more decayed, Danton, who had been killed 
that it might exist, pursued it. It was due to his work 
that the wrestling on the frontier was showing a definite 
issue. The advance had begun. 

With his death the diplomacy of France had ceased. 
The phrase of Robespierre's, which he had so successfully 
combated, had reappeared in vigour : the " nation would 
not treat with her enemies." But the organisation of her 
armies, the levies, the rigid discipline, the arms were tell- 
ing. That aspect of the national energy had grown more 
healthy as the central brain grew more diseased and vain. 
Robespierre was threatening Carnot vaguely in the Com- 
mittee, but Carnot was at work and was saving France. 



ROBESPIERRE 293 

St. Just himself, when he is upon the frontier, appears in 
a capacity worthy of admiration, for he has there to deal 
with a thing in action. His energy is as fierce as ever, 
but its object is victory over a national enemy, and not 
the triumph of a jejune idea. He had better have re- 
mained with the soldiers. 

In Paris the Commune had been seized. The enemy 
whom all had feared, whom even Danton had to the last 
conciliated, was fearlessly grasped. The mayor was broken 
simply, and replaced by a servant of the rulers ; the 
Sections protested with the last of their vitality, but the 
Club denounced them, and they disappeared — even an 
attempt at martyrdom is to give the idol yet more gilt. 
Then the news of Turcoing came to Paris. It was little 
more than a happy rumour, a battle whose importance 
seems greater to us now than it did to contemporaries. 
But Pichegru, the peasant, had prepared a good road for 
Jourdan, and Fleurus was the direct result of Turcoing. 
Barrfere long after called these victories " the Furies," which 
swept upon and destroyed the fanatic in power. 

With every point of good news the Terror was less 
necessary, yet Robespierre's action grew as the national 
danger disappeared. Even Lord Howe's great victory of 
the ist of June did Httle to check the sentiment of re- 
lief. The Vengeur went down and left a force of many 
ships to the French navy for ever. The food reached 
port, and the eyes of Frenchmen were not directed to the 
sea, whose command they knew themselves to have gained 
and lost before then with but little resulting change ; they 
turned, as they have always and will ever turn, to the 
frontier of the north-east, the wrestling-ring upon whose 
fair level was to be decided the fate of all their sacrifice 
and of all their ideals, and Paris every day grew more 
hopeful of the result, Robespierre more blind to every- 
thing except his vision. On the 8 th of June — the 20th 
Prairial — he capped the edifice of his national religion 



294 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

with tlie Feast of tiie Supreme Being ; on the i oth he 
forged the last piece of the machinery which was to make 
that religion the moral order of the new era by force. 

In the connection of these dates we see the whole 
man and the time. Three weeks pass from the first 
definite victory against the allies to the law of the 22 nd 
Prairial. That short time widened the breach between 
the armies and the government till it became an impass- 
able gulf. The fruit of that schism was to appear much 
later, but already its elements were clear. Of the two 
parts of Danton's work one had become national, healthy, 
representative; the other, which had been designed for 
similar action, had finally become a thing of personalities 
and of theories. The armies were in full success, the 
Terror was menaced, and was doomed. 

In this feast of the Almighty, Kobespierre was insanely 
himself. He wore his bright-blue coat, perhaps to typify 
the bright sky which we have all worshipped for so many 
thousand years. In his little white hand, that never had 
been nor could be put to a man's work, he held the typical 
offerings of fruit and corn. His head was bent forward 
a little, and he looked at the ground. The men who stood 
up boldly in the attitudes of Mirabeau and of the Tribunes 
were dead or in the armies. 

Remove the scene by hundreds of years, and tell it 
of a primitive people in some mountain valley, it assumes 
a simplicity and a grandeur as legend. Their old tradi- 
tions (let us say) have been lost or stolen from them. 
They are casting about for a lawgiver and for a starting- 
point. A pure idealist is found, draconian in his method, 
but ascetic and sincere in his life, laying down as neces- 
sary for the state a clear and simple morality, basing all 
ethics on the recognition and the worship of God. If we 
make that picture we have some idea of what passed 
through the mind of the little clique which still sur- 
rounded Robespierre, some conception of the picture which 



ROBESPIERRE 295 

still iialf-fascinated tlie crowd. For Robespierre himself 
it was intensely true; lie lived seons and myriads of 
leagues away in time and space from humanity, intent 
upon his dream. 

But in sight of the mummery stood Notre Dame. 
Not a man there but had been baptized in the Christian 
faith; a history more complex and more eventful than 
that of perhaps any other nation was the inheritance and 
the future of that crowd. And even as the game was 
being played, the real France on the Sambre and in the 
plains of Valenciennes was carrying out the oldest of 
struggles in defence of the first of rights. The scene has 
been laughed at and despised sufficiently by aliens within 
and without the French nation ; let it suffice for this book 
to insist upon its unreality, and to assert that its prin- 
cipal actor was genuine because he lived in the unreal. 

The law of the 22nd of Prairial followed this feast. 
It was the establishment of a pure despotism, arbitrary, 
absolute, personal. Already the trials were centralised in 
Paris since the demand of St. Just had been made. The 
Commune had been captured, the popular commissions 
used, even the Presidency of the Convention had be- 
come the appanage of one man and his associates. This 
new law proposed the final step. After it was passed the 
trials were to be conducted without proofs, and without 
witness or pleading, for they were to be nothing more 
than a formal process. The Committee once satisfied of 
guilt, the tribunal was merely to condemn. To be upon 
the lists was virtually to be dead. It was the end of civil 
government, the declaration of a state of siege. And that 
at the moment when the armies sent every day better and 
better news. The Convention debated with Robespierre 
in the chair ; it hesitated and it nearly condemned the 
proposal. There was a conflict in the minds of some 
between the admiration — almost the adoration — of a man ; 
in the minds of others, between fear and the necessity 



296 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

apparent to all of relaxing tlie machinery wliicli only the 
national danger had called into being. 

Kobespierre came down from the chair and spoke. 
The even, certain voice which carried away his admirers, 
which terrified his opponents, succeeded, and the law was 
passed. Those who find it easy to judge the time, who 
think it may all be explained by the baseness or the 
pusillanimity of the Parliament, should note the appeal 
which he made to the Moderates even then — an appeal 
which had always been successful, which, when his death 
drew near, he made at last (and for the first time) in 
vain. 

For the Moderates, the Plain, the "Marsh," saw in him 
a kind of saviour, the just man, the slayer of the Moun- 
tain, the master who would be terrible only for a little 
time, and would soon restore peace when he had esta- 
blished a dogma of moral order. Were Moderates ever 
slow to give full power for the sake of order ? 

The next day some one saw that the new law touched 
the Parliament itself. Self-defence, the most sacred, per- 
haps the only, right of a prince, occurred to them, and 
they protested. They passed a resolution that no member 
could be taken before the Kevolutionary Tribunal with- 
out their consent. The following day Robespierre again 
appears, again appeals to the " Marsh." The men of 
order saw at once that no danger applied to them, that 
the disorderly fellows up on the benches of the Left alone 
were in danger. The resolution was repealed. On that 
day, the 24th of Prairial of the year II. — 12th of June 
1794 — the whole of France was at his feet, save the 
armies. 

The France which had made the Revolution, and 
which Danton had loved, defended, and saved, was in the 
Ardennes and before Ypres. There were two main bodies. 
One, on the left, in the plains by the frontier towns, was 
opposed to a united force of English and Austrians ; the 



ROBESPIERRE 297 

otlier, on the riglit, in the woods and deep ravines of the 
Ardennes, was opposed to a strong series of Austrian posts. 
These armies were not separated, but the enemy held the 
angle between them. Away on the extreme right Jourdan 
held the Moselle valley. Pichegru had come back to the 
army of the left, which in his absence had won Turcoing, 
and at whose head Soudham, Moreau, and Macdonald had 
fought and succeeded. On the right St. Just was throw- 
ing into the attack upon the Sambre all the energy which 
had saved, before this, the army of Alsace. Five times 
the attempt had been made to pierce the Austrian lines, 
and five times it had failed. Coburg lay on both sides 
of the river ; Charleroy, on the right bank, was his 
strong place. The Deputies on mission, St. Just and 
Lebas, the same whom we shall see standing by Robes- 
pierre at the end, were present at the last decisive check 
before Charleroy itself. With the Sambre thus held, the 
southern army was immobilised; the successes of the 
army of the north seemed almost valueless, for Coburg 
held the angle between the two. Nevertheless, Turcoing 
bore great fruit, for it convinced the Austrians that 
reinforcements were needed to meet the French advance 
in the north. The allies were like a man fighting with a 
sword in each hand against two opponents. Wounded in 
the right hand, he must cross rapidly with the sword in 
his left, and so expose his left side. Thus Coburg left 
the Sambre a little more exposed in order to provide tem- 
porary reinforcements against the army that had just 
won Turcoing. St. Just and Carnot were enemies ; the 
young Robespierrian was planned to replace the organiser 
whom Danton had recognised ; nevertheless, they agreed 
at this supreme moment upon the necessary action. St. 
Just from the army, Carnot from the Ministry of War at 
Paris, called up Jourdan from the Moselle with over forty 
thousand men. 

They are wrong who imagine that Napoleon invented 



298 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

the attack by concentration on the weakest point ; so far 
as the large Knes of a campaign go he inherited it from 
the early Eepublican generals. Leaving strong places un- 
occupied, careless of holding (for example) this position 
on the Moselle, the hurried march northward was deter- 
mined on, and a supreme effort against the Austrian 
lines. 

By this junction was formed that " Army of the 
Sambre-et-Meuse " which to this day gives a theme for 
one of the noblest marching-songs of the French soldiery. 
Under Jourdan were men whose names alone have some- 
thing of the quality of bugle- calls. Ney, and Kleber, and 
Marceau were leading them. There ran through this new 
army a kind of prescience, the foreknowledge of victory, 
an unaccustomed feeling of expansion and of hope. Soult 
speaks of it as his awakening ; and there is a fine phrase 
in the memoir of a contemporary which gives us some 
echo of its enthusiasm : " We always seemed to be march- 
ing into the dawn;" they felt in every rank 'that the 
balance was turning, and that France was to be saved. 

A sixth attempt was for a sixth time foiled. The 
seventh succeeded. The Austrian line was broken and 
Charleroy surrounded ; in a week it fell. The capitula- 
tion was hardly achieved when the army of Coburg 
appeared to the north-east upon the heights that com- 
mand the left bank of the river, a plateau called that of 
Fleurus. 

It was upon the 25 th of June that the armies met 
and fought with blazing hay about them and ripe harvest 
that had caught fire. Kleber recovered the left wing, as 
Cromwell at Naseby, after it had given way. Marceau 
obstinately held the right in front of Fleurus, as Davoust 
did at Austerlitz ten years later. And towards evening 
the watchers in the balloon above the French ranks saw 
in regular and stiff retreat the last army of the old world. 
By the end of Messidor the English were in Holland, the 



ROBESPIERRE 299 

Austrians upon the Rhine, the whole of Belgium was in 
the hands of the Republic. 

The sun which set upon the death of Danton had 
risen again. 

So in Robespierre's own country his fall was prepared 
by circumstances. At Arras, his birthplace, one could 
almost hear the guns of Fleurus; he and his thin soul 
belonged to those plains of the north where the Norman 
and the Burgundian, and the Provengal and the Gascon, 
born in more generous places, were driving the enemy 
before them. 

St. Just came back from the front. He at least had 
seen on what Revolutionary France was really bent, and 
in what she was vigorous. With the superb courage that 
belonged to his energy and his youth he had led the 
charges. Living with the soldiers, he had seen more 
closely, and with more accuracy than is common in 
visionaries, the needs of an army. Why did he come 
back to continue the insane drama whose seven weeks of 
action count more with the enemies of France than all 
her centuries ? 

Because the armies and their victories, though afford- 
ing proof of what the nation was and of what it required, 
could afford that proof only to a just and even mind. The 
soldiers themselves did not express a political opinion; 
their whole mind was bent upon the breaking of the line, 
the attempt in which they had succeeded. Of Paris, Revolu- 
tionary in the last few months, they knew little. They 
judged it as our contemporaries do — on hearsay ; and it 
seemed to them that there stood in the capital a powerful 
Committee full of patriots, who had by an intense, an 
almost furious energy, saved them — the soldiers. Men 
who risk their lives every day and see death constantly 
are not likely to be horror-stricken at an excess of rigour 
in government. In their eyes a number of men had 
fallen, places had changed, the central power was sur- 



300 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

rounded by a tumult, but they had been clothed and fed 
almost by a miracle — their battles had been made possible. 
The year since the great conscription had drawn them 
from their homes had been for them a struggle of con- 
tinual promise, ending in a great achievement. Already 
the soldier was half-professional; the eager volunteer of 
92, full of his politics, had given place to a type which 
the wanton policy of the old regime was forging to its 
own destruction. For it was forging the veterans who 
cared more and more for the Revolutionary thing, and 
less and less for the discussions and the theories, till at 
last they produced the Empire. 

St. Just therefore could not warn Robespierre. St. 
Just himself had learnt no lesson. His ideal was still 
in his eyes the salvation of France, and even of the 
world; the victory of Fleurus only made it the more 
possible to carry his ideal out in action. He had seen 
the emigrants who were taken in that battle spared for 
the first time by the French soldiery, but he did not 
recognise the tremendous import of this, nor appreciate 
what our own time has thoroughly learnt, that it is the 
success or the failure of the national defence which rules 
the temper of a nation. 

When the news of Fleurus became known in Paris 
the law of Prairial had been in action for nearly three 
weeks. By the time the victory and its meaning had 
fully sunk into the mind of the capital half the short 
period of Robespierre had expired. How much was due 
to fear upon his part, how much to mere blindness, we 
cannot tell, but the very moment when the necessity for 
the Terror patently disappeared was the moment chosen 
by him for the aggravation of his system. 

He attacked the Mountain. 

It will be remembered that the Convention had feared 
for itself when it gave the full power into his hands. On 
the 1 1 th of June Bourdon from the Oise had carried a 



ROBESPIERRE 301 

motion which would have defended the deputies, but 
which Kobespierre had caused to be cancelled upon the 
following day. 

With an attack, however, appearing as a reality 
instead of remaining as a threat, even the " Marsh " grew 
afraid. He put into his speech an excellent maxim, that 
" not success of armies abroad or on the frontier are the 
greatness of a nation, but the virtue of its private citizens 
within" (21st Messidor) — a truth appearing perhaps at 
the very worst moment, for it translated itself at once 
in the minds of his audience into " the victories mean 
nothing to me ; the guillotine is for the defence not of the 
nation but of my dogmas." And his faith went on sacri- 
ficing its innumerable victims. 

Another and a final element was added to the forces 
against him. The Committee began to refuse his leader- 
ship. It must be remembered that Robespierre was not 
absolute master in the sense in which (for example) an 
English general would be master of an Indian province 
after the suppression of a mutiny. Circumstances, im- 
mense popularity, above all the kind of men who com- 
posed the great Committee, are the explanation of his 
power. His power was a fact, but a fact based on no 
theoretical right, and therefore possessed of no elements 
of endurance. Even the Committee was in the eyes of 
all the governed, and of some of its own members, only 
the servant of the national welfare. Two men upon it 
were Robespierrians — Couthon and St. Just; one was a 
turncoat by nature — Barrere ; two more were men of the 
Hebertian type, most unreliable for an idealist to deal 
with — Billaud and CoUot. Finally there remains Carnot, 
the worker, and four others — the two Prieurs, Lindet 
and St. Andrd. 

Robespierre could be virtually a master, bi;t a master 
only on the tolerance of superior though latent force. 
He could inspire terror by the common knowledge that 



302 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

tlie macliinery was in his hands, that its terrible punish- 
ment was practically his to inflict at pleasure. But 
something put it into his hand, and something could 
take it away. It cannot be too often repeated, if we 
wish to understand the Revolution, that from the fall 
of Lafayette to the 13th of October 1795 there was no 
disciplined armed force at the service of the Govern- 
ment, there was nobody better armed or better drilled 
than the man in the street — not even gunners, the first 
necessity of modern masters, for the very artillery was 
amateur; above all, there was no armed body whose 
members obeyed without question, who were, as a good 
army must be, a rigid instrument of government framed 
upon a device which multiplies a hundredfold the strength 
of each man in the public service. The " strong men " 
of history, whom our reactionaries delight to honour, 
have always had such an instrument at their disposition, 
but when there is no one to fire at a command, your 
strong man is like any other, save that he is a little 
weaker for shouting. 

What then was the ultimate master which permitted 
Robespierre to rule ? It was composed of several forces, 
and in its division is to be found the secret of its 
inertia. 

Firstly, the Convention, mutilated as it was, was 
granted by all to be the nearest representative of the 
nation. What the majority voted was done. It exercised 
a very great moral influence, and if it had shown that 
influence so slightly, it was because its organisation was 
contemptible — a mass of individuals, with no traditions 
of action or of grouping, a crowd in which the fear 
of each that another might be his enemy caused the 
sum of its individual cries to be anything but the inte- 
grate expression of its corporate will. Well, this crowd 
had had one formidable enemy. The right of the Con- 
vention had been combated by the force of the well- 



ROBESPIERRE 303 

organised Commune. The Commune used to be a mirror 
of at least half of Paris ; it had lost this character. It 
was nothing now but a group of Robespierrians, and the 
Convention was the stronger for the change. 

Secondly, there was the material force — the populace 
of Paris. They had not risen hitherto save for one or 
two motives — the establishment of the national defence, 
the prevention of a political reaction ; and they had been 
more turbulent and more dangerous where the first than 
where the second was their cause for action. 

Thirdly, the regular initiative was in the hands of 
a majority of the Committee of Public Safety. 

The moment therefore that the majority of the Com- 
mittee refused to follow Robespierre's lead, he would have 
had to ascend the tribune of the Convention, and in one 
of those speeches which carried to some such genuine 
conviction, but to many others such still more genuine 
fear, he would have had to obtain a majority for the 
reconstruction of the great Committee. 

Now a deliberative Assembly which is not strictly 
organised upon party lines, which has no aristocratic 
quality and no great (because traditional) corporate pride, 
is very strongly influenced by what we call " Public 
Opinion." It hears reports from the whole nation, is 
composed of every kind of man, regards itself moreover 
as in duty bound to listen to the voices outside, meets 
in its lobbies and during its recesses every species of 
expression. 

Such a jury is therefore the very worst before which 
a popular idol could present itself when some strong 
adverse action had just shown his reputation to be falling. 
Outvoted in Committee, condemned in Parliament, the 
man who had but just now been supreme would have 
to turn to whatever he could find of physical force to 
support him. 

But that physical force in the case of Robespierre 



304 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

was only the populace of Paris, and a populace moreover 
whose one organising centre — the Commune — had been 
weakened by himself. Once suppose him forced to 
depend upon a rising of the people, and the weakness of 
his position is apparent ; even were he still the politician 
of the majority, it would be a long step from approving 
of his policy to risking one's life in a civil tumult, con- 
scious that one was attacking every form of constituted 
authority, and presumably the opinion of the whole 
nation, for no principle, from no necessity, but to save 
a man. As we shall see, the rising to defend him com- 
prised but a small knot of men, and totally failed. 

The man who had not the wits to cook an egg 
prepared his own ruin. Carnot, whose one idea was to 
work and save the frontier, he openly menaced. Robes- 
pierre meditated the inconceivable folly of replacing 
Carnot's science by the blind activity of St. Just. In 
alienating Carnot and losing that possible ally, Robespierre 
lost five of his colleagues on the Committee. The end of 
Messidor saw him in a kind of voluntary isolation, letting the 
fatal machine work on, while he stood off from the levers. 

He seems to have just felt two doubts disturbing the 
serenity of his fanatical complacency. First, whether 
after all he was going down to posterity as he saw him- 
self to be — the maker of a new France, " the terror of 
oppressors and the refuge of the oppressed." (One day 
his eyes filled when the noise of the tumbrils reached 
him, and he said, " I shall be remembered only as a slayer 
of men." So wrapped up in himself, he had not yet 
heard an echo of what all men were saying.) Secondly, 
he wondered whether his perfect state was so near as he 
had thought. The killing went on, and he got no nearer. 
The " anti-patriots," the " anti-revolutionaries," the " anti- 
Robespierres " (though he did not think of them so) 
passed perpetually eastward and westward daily from 
the prisons to the two guillotines 



ROBESPIERRE 



3^5 



By the irony of whatever rules and laughs at men, 
events caused the first mutterings to rise among the 
Extremists. The Terror was too mild, and above all the 
men with hearts of beasts — the remainder of the Hebertists 
— hated a policy which included, however fantastically, 
the ideal and the worship of God. They hated his half- 
alliance with whatever was Christian in the Convention, 
and his perpetual appeals to the Moderates. 

The Lower Committee had a partially independent life. 
It was known to be the policy of Robespierre to submit 
this body, as he had submitted all the other organs of 
government, to the great Committee of Public Safety. 
Hence it was in this Lower Committee of General Security 
— menaced as a function and as individuals, thoroughly 
in touch, by its position, with the police — that the con- 
spiracy arose. The majority of its members joined it, and 
from the Higher Committee Billaud and Collot adhered. 
On the 7th of Thermidor (25 th of July 1794) the storm 
burst. Barrere read his report to the Convention, and it 
was an open menace to Robespierre. 

The origins of that report merit a certain discussion. 
We have seen that from the first the reports, directed by 
the Committee, were usually written by Barrere, and were 
read to the Convention by him. On the other hand, we 
can discover usually in the style, and always in the 
opinions of the reports, the action of whoever led in the 
councils of the Committee. Thus, in the document of 
this nature of which so much mention is made in chapter 
vi,, the spirit, and evidently many of the actual phrases, 
are the work of Danton. 

Who drew up Barr^re's report, whether (possibly) it 
was his own work, when he saw opinion shifting away from 
Robespierre, or whether, as is more probable, it was in- 
spired by Billaud and Collot, and permitted by the five 
neutrals, we cannot tell. The main fact is this, that the 
Committee had at least permitted to be made in its name 

U 



3o6 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

a public declaration hostile to the man who, through the 
Committee, had ruled France. 

The report repudiated in detail the policy of the past 
seven weeks ; it insisted on the importance of the vic- 
tories, on the iniquity of further lists of victims. For 
the first time in four months the Convention acted 
freely ; it ordered the report to be printed and to be sent 
to all the Communes of France. 

On the next day Robespierre came for the last time 
into his accustomed place. He gave his last speech to 
the Parliament. He was to appear once more, but never 
again as the orator and the leader. Reading, as was his 
wont, not declaiming, in the slow even voice that had 
compelled such attention, such enthusiasm, and such fear, 
he made the last of his declarations. This speech, if no 
other, should be read to understand the man. Here 
a theory stated with power and with precision ; there a 
description of those without whose condemnation the 
theory could not be realised. A noble ideal based upon 
the scaffold ; a dogma and a detailed persecution side by 
side. He read it slowly from end to end, proving to 
himself, and, as he thought, to his audience, the perfection 
of his ideal, and the necessity of the terrible road towards 
it. But his audience heard nothing of the ideal; they 
heard only the description of themselves. 

Men of all kinds, the mere demagogues, were in that 
summary, the personal enemies, the financiers. It seems 
that on the manuscript from which he read even Cambon's 
name was written. But in this extreme crisis, when he 
was denouncing the first men in order to save his 
own position, he was no longer Robespierre. It made 
no difference to his fate, yet we judge him with more 
accuracy when we know that he omitted the name of 
Cambon, and that he did not pronounce that of Carnot, 
whom he had threatened in private. It was an attempt 
at compromise. 



ROBESPIERRE 307 

The Convention heard him and his threat. Of his 
theories they had heard enough for years. Yet such was 
the power of his slow clear utterance, of the reverence 
which his following commanded, and of the idea which he 
expressed so well, and in which all at heart believed, that 
they voted the printing and the dissemination of the 
speech. Cambon and Billaud-Varennes rose to demand 
the repeal of the vote. The great unwieldy assembly, or 
rather its great unwieldy neutral faction, hesitated, con- 
ferred, and yielded to the demand. Then Robespierre 
was doomed. 

As he was reading, as the distribution of the speech 
and then its repeal were being voted, there hung above his 
head and that of the Parliament the flags taken in 
the new victories from the English and Austrians at Tur- 
coing, at Landrecies, at Quesnoy, at Conde, at Valenciennes, 
at Fleurus, and it was they that turned the scale. 

When the evening came the Club met, the little 
society of the Jacobins, which was still the most indepen- 
dent and the most vital force in Paris. It had dared to 
elect a president for its debates whose whole policy was 
antagonistic to Robespierre ; yet now it heard him and 
remembered its old idol. He re-read, in the same tone, 
but in a more familiar surrounding and with ampler 
diction, the speech of the morning, and his hearers grew 
wild with enthusiasm. They hissed and they turned out 
Billaud and Collot, who had dared to be present ; they 
cried out to Robespierre that they would follow him 
always towards the perfect Republic ; and David, an ex- 
cellent artist and a bad man, cried to him from the back, 
" I will drink the hemlock with you ! " but he was afraid 
even to acknowledge his master when Robespierre came 
to die. 

The Jacobins that night were ready to rise for Robes- 
pierre. As so many minorities have been in that city of 
convictions and of intense enthusiasms, they were ready to 



3o8 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

impose themselves and their creed upon the capital and 
upon France ; hut they did not know to what a handful 
they had been reduced in the last seven weeks. All night 
the conspiracy against Eobespierre worked hard. Boissy 
D'Anglas, the leader of the " Marsh," was brought over. To 
him and his followers Robespierre was pointed out as 
the tyrant; to what was left of the Mountain he was 
denounced as the moderate and the compromiser. But, 
above all, he was, to the great bulk of the Convention, the 
enemy who had destroyed all civil order in pursuit of his 
mad theories, and who had even held the victories of no 
account. 

The Parliament met the next morning, on the 9th of 
Thermidor (27th of July). It was a year to a day since 
Robespierre had joined the great Committee ; but it was 
for the condemnation of Robespierre that they met. The 
great hall waited for a coming tumult. First into the 
tribune went St, Just, with his beautiful face and strong 
bearing, determined in oratory as in the battles to strike 
at once and lead a charge. He was eloquent, for he was 
trying to save his friend ; he boldly attempted argument, 
a compromise, anything ; called it " saving the Republic." 
"Let us end his domination if you will, but let the 
government still be that of the Revolution, and let 
us draw up such rules as shall save us from arbitrary 
power without destroying the motive force of the national 
demand." The sentiment was precisely that of the Con- 
vention, but the speaker was known to be merely the 
young bodyguard of their enemy. 

Tallien called out from the right, "PuU back the 
curtain," and, though the fellow was an actor, he 
had struck the right note. St. Just could never defend 
Robespierre; it would have been a cloak for continuing 
the Terror. The Convention applauded, and from ap- 
plause turned to crying down St. Just in a public roar of 
fear and hatred. 



ROBESPIERRE 309 

Then twice Robespierre tried to speak; the hubbub 
silenced him. During a lull in the storm they voted 
the arrest of Henriot. It meant the transference of such 
pitiful armed force as he commanded from the hand of 
a friend to that of an enemy. Robespierre made a last 
effort to rescind that order. He was not heard. 

Tallien was given the tribune by the Speaker (CoUot 
was Speaker that day, and CoUot had been turned out by 
the Jacobins the night before). Tallien spoke theatri- 
cally, as he always did, but to the point. Robespierre, he 
said, had plotted to destroy the assembly for his pur- 
poses ; he quoted the speech of the day before. While 
Barr^re, the turncoat, stood looking this way and that, 
not knowing how things would turn. Once more Robes- 
pierre attempted a reply; he only raised a storm that 
drowned his voice. 

When he saw that full speech was denied him, he 
turned from the place where he stood towards the 
" Marsh," the Moderates, and said, " I appeal to you who 
are just and who are not conspiring with these assassins ; " 
but the " Marsh " was lost to him — they also cried him 
down. 

A little silence followed. They saw Robespierre 
attempting for a fifth time to speak, but the agony of 
the night and the fearful struggle of the morning had 
overcome him at last : his voice could not be heard 
though he tried to articulate. Garnier of the Aube 
called to him across the floor of the hall, "The blood 
of Danton chokes you." It was the truest thing said in 
that wild meeting. 

Before the silence was broken, Louchet, an unknown 
man, rose and proposed the arrest, sa3dng openly what 
all thought: "No one will deny that Robespierre has 
played the master ; let us vote his arrest." Then Robes- 
pierre found his voice. He went up four steps above 
his usual seat, to a place where, high up and from the 



3IO THE LIFE OF DANTON 

left, from the summit of wliat had been the Mountain in 
the old days, he could see the whole of that multitudi- 
nous assembly, with whose aid he had hoped to regene- 
rate France and to save mankind. Beneath him as a 
host, like the dim pictures of Martin's Milton, rank on 
rank, he saw so many heads that it must have seemed 
to him a nation. He remembered all his dreams of a 
perfect state, of men living in equality, with no one 
oppressed and no one oppressing, of a government based 
upon the clear will of all, and upon the civic virtues 
which he had preached, till there should rise the perfect 
Kepublic, an exemplar for all the nations. He saw that 
he was doomed, and with him all his dreams. Perhaps, 
also, he saw the armed despotism which he had twice 
prophesied coming in his place. To the last he did not 
understand his folly, and he replied to the demand of 
Louchet, " Vote for my death." 

Le Bas, who had been with St. Just in the Ardennes, 
who had helped to make the great army of Sambre-et- 
Meuse, and Robespierre the younger, another honest man, 
came and did what David failed to do — they said they 
would die with him, and took his hands in theirs. The 
Committee passed to the vote, and the three were taken 
away with St. Just and with Couthon. The scene that 
follows is the end of the Revolution in Paris. 

Twice at least in the course of the preceding five 
years Paris had risen against the law and had removed 
an obstacle or a man for the sake of the Revolution. 
The random Municipality of 1789 (which for all its dis- 
order was the parent of the puissant modern system of 
Communes) is an example in point ; the 2nd of June is 
another. Ultimately the people of Paris were the only 
force on which government rested, and it was to them 
that the final appeal was made. 

The Commune possessed the initiative in this matter — 
it was the sole centre of Paris in theory ; and now that 



ROBESPIERRE 311 

the clubs were all in decay (save the Jacobins), now that 
the great orators were exiled or dead, and that the Sec- 
tions themselves did not meet, the Commune was also 
the only centre in fact. But the Commune, it will be 
remembered, had become a Robespierrian thing. It 
determined to rise against the Convention. 

The Convention had ordered the arrest of Henriot, 
who was commander of the armed force (such as it was) 
of the town. It sent his successor, Hesmart to do the 
work. But the head of a number of pikes and guns 
would not submit to a man who represented only the 
law, and instead of Hesmart arresting Henriot, it was 
Henriot who arrested Hesmart. 

Meanwhile the other officers of the Commune dis- 
played the same energy, the same rapidity of execution 
and design which under better leaders and for a better 
cause had hitherto succeeded. Lescot-Payot (the Robes- 
pierrian mayor who had been put into the place of Pache 
on the 2 1 st of Floreal), and Payan the national agent, 
were at the head of the movement. They sent orders to 
the prisons to refuse the arrested deputies, they gave 
Henriot the formal order to employ his full force and 
act. They raised the Jacobins. They formed a com- 
mittee of nine who were to take over the government; 
they ordered the arrest of their principal enemies in the 
Convention, and most important of all, they convened the 
Sections. 

They had only a night to work in — the 9th Ther- 
midor to the loth — and their work had the energy of a 
fever ; but the greatest factor of all was lacking — the fever 
did not spread. The inertia of the people, even their 
disapproval, was evident as they proceeded ; the majority 
of such Sections as did meet stood aloof from or con- 
demned the cause of Robespierre. 

While it was still just light, between eight and nine in 
the evening, Robespierre, whom the keepers of the Luxem- 



312 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

burg prison had refused, was brouglit to the Mairie, and 
there one after the other all the arrested deputies came, 
profiting by the official routine; for the Mairie was the 
" right place " officially for prisoners when a difficulty 
arose as to imprisonment within Paris. But official 
routine had a strange bedfellow that night, for while the 
officials took the prisoners there, the small band of rebels, 
who knew of no place more friendly, brought there also 
those whom they had delivered by force. Robespierre 
was again with the strongest of his friends — his brother, 
St. Just, Couthon; he was surrounded by an organised 
and legal body, the Commune, which had risen in his 
defence ; they passed to the Hotel de Ville, and outside, 
on the Place de Gr^ve, there gathered between ten o'clock 
and eleven a fairly large group of the National Guard. 
But there was no order among them, nor any accurate 
knowledge among their officers as to what was to be done. 
From the windows of the room where Robespierre and 
his companions sat, there could be dimly seen a moving 
crowd of mingled citizens and guards, discussing rather 
than preparing for action. 

Robespierre refused to put himself at the head of the 
movement ; at least it is only thus that we can explain 
the delay and the confusion. He was to the last the 
strange mixture of lawyer and pedant and idealist. He 
would not act without the legal right, for his pedantry 
forbade it, nor move with an armed minority, because, 
iudged by his theories, it would have been a crime. Per- 
haps at the very last he decided to move : there exists a 
document authorising a march on the Convention, and at 
its base the first three letters of his name — the signature 
unfinished, interrupted. 

Meanwhile the Convention had found a new energy 
and a power of corporate action to which it had been long 
a stranger — each man there was defending his life. Le- 
gendre, with a small force, went and closed the Jacobins. 



ROBESPIERRE 313 

Barras was given the command of such armed men as 
could be gathered; the two committees sent emissaries 
who appealed with success to the Sections. The Con- 
vention was the law which had always meant so much 
to the people; it was the authority of the constitu- 
tion. Its majority, obeyed when it was in lethargy, 
could not but be successful when it awoke. AU Paris 
defended it. 

At midnight one of the sudden thunder-showers which 
are common in the Seine valley at that season cleared 
what was left of the crowd before the Hotel de Ville. 
They had discussed both sides, and they had not decided 
— hardly an army for rebellion ; they had doubted what 
business they had there, and with the rain they went 
home. Yet it was not till two hours after, in the early 
morning, that the little band of the Convention came into 
the square. They found it almost empty, with here and 
there a small group standing on the wet cobble-stones, 
sleepy but curious. 

Bourdon and a few policemen went into the Hotel de 
Ville and found no defenders. They went up to the room 
where the conspirators sat. 

Robespierre was on the ground with his jaw broken by 
a pistol-shot. 

At half-past seven in the evening of that day (the 
loth Thermidor) twenty-two of the Robespierrians were 
taken in three carts to the guillotine. Robespierre him- 
self, half-unconscious from his wound, stood propped 
against the side of the cart, his head bandaged, his arms 
bound, his chin upon his breast. Ropes also bound his 
body to the sides of the tumbril. He passed the house 
where Duplay had sheltered him, and where he had hidden 
himself, so as not to hear the noise of the executioners' 
carts. Now beneath him the heavy wheels were making 
the same sound on the ruts of the Rue St. Honor^. At 
a cross-street the cart stopped to let pass the funeral of 



314 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Madame Aigu^ who had killed herself the day before from 
fear of Robespierre. 

As they neared the Place of the Revolution, where 
Louis and Danton had suffered, probably at the turning 
of the Rue St. Honor^, where the guillotine came in sight 
and where Danton had sung his song, a woman came for- 
ward from the crowd — doubtless some one whom his 
tyranny had directly bereaved — and struck Robespierre a 
blow. For sixteen hours he had not spoken nor made a 
sign, but when he felt through this blow the popular 
hatred, he made a gesture of contempt and of despair ; 
he shrugged his shoulders, but kept his innumerable 
thoughts within the bandages. " De mourir jpour U jpeuple 
et d'en Stre abhorr6" 

Then — so the greatest of French historians tell us — 
France marched down a broad road to the tomb where 
she has left two millions of men. 

But the armies of the great twenty years cannot be 
stated in the terms of one man's ambition, nor summed 
up in any of the simple formulse which a just hatred of 
Csesarism has framed to explain them. At the root of 
every battle of the Empire was the organisation and the 
enthusiasm of 1793. The tactics of Austerlitz and of 
Jena were learned in Flanders ; the enthusiasm of the 
Guard itself came in clear descent from the exaltation of 
the Sambre-et-Meuse. 

In this book we have attempted to judge the first man 
of a great crisis in relation to his time ; it is still more 
essential that, when we consider the after-effects of his 
action, a whole nation under arms should stand in the 
right historical framework, its gigantic effort part and 
parcel of a supreme necessity. 

We can understand, we can speak rationally, and there- 
fore truly, of Danton, when we show him above all loving 
and defending France and the Revolutionary Thing : that 



ROBESPIERRE 315 

same appreciation will make us follow clearly the con- 
tinuous development of his action. It is hardly too much 
to say that, until Tilsit, the French had to advance or be 
crushed — nation, creed, and men. 

The men and the armies must be for us the men and 
the armies that gave a new vigour to Europe ; the details 
of their action should not be the matter of our judgment, 
but their relation to the whole community — its needs, its 
defence, its faith. 

As the time grows greater between that period and our 
own, a just proportion imposes itself. The flame which, 
close at hand, burnt in a formless furnace is beginning to 
assume a certain shape. From a standpoint so distant 
that no living memory bridges the gulf, we can measure 
the light, the heat, and even the fuel of that flame. 

As to its final meaning in our society, every day makes 
that clearer ; and, to change the metaphor, this much be- 
comes more and more apparent, that through whatever 
crises the Western civilisation is to pass, and whatever form 
its edifice will finally take, when the noise of the building 
is over, the corner-stone, with its immense strength and its 
precision of line, was planned by the philosophy and was 
hewn by the force of the Revolution. Civilisations die, and 
ours was dying before that wind swept across Europe. 

It would have been a poor excuse for leaving unre- 
moved the rubble, the dust, and the putrescence of the old 
world to have pleaded that the decay was the action of 
centuries, and that old things alone were worthy of rever- 
ence. Old things alone are worthy of reverence, but old 
things which have grown old upon just and sure founda- 
tions, to which time has added ornament and the satis- 
faction of harmonious colour, without destroying the main 
lines, and without sapping the strength by which they 
live. 

The new foundations alone stand at the present day. 
They are crude, they satisfy nothing in us permanently, 



3i6 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

they are very far from affording that sentiment of content 
which is the first requisite of a happy civihsation. But 
time will do in this case, as it has always done in every 
other, the work of harmony and of completion. The final 
society will not be without its innumerable complexity of 
detail, its humour, and its inner life. Certainly it will not 
long remain a stranger to the unseen ; but it will be built 
upon 1793. 

Meanwhile the light grows on the origins. The per- 
sonal bitterness which the struggle produced has passed. 
It is a pious memory in this or that family in France to 
give itself still the name of a Revolutionary faction ; but 
the hatred that has produced confusion in honest critics, 
and that has furnished such ample material for false his- 
tory, that hatred is disappearing in France. The ven- 
dettas have ceased, and the grosser of the calumnies are 
no longer heard. The history of the Revolution began to 
be possible when Louis Blanc sat down to curse the up- 
heaval that had killed his father, and ended by producing 
the work which more than any other exalted the ex- 
treme Revolutionary ideal. 

The story of that time is now like a photographic 
negative, which a man fixes, washing away the white 
cloud from the clean detail of the film. Point after 
point, then more rapidly whole spaces, stand out pre- 
cise and true. And the certitude which he feels that the 
underlying picture is an accurate reminiscence of Nature 
comes to us also when we make out and fix some passage in 
the Revolution, cleared of its mass of hearsay, of vitupera- 
tion, of ignorance, and of mere sound. 

We are beginning to see a great picture, consonant in 
its details, and consecutive in its action. The necessity of 
reform ; the light of the ideal striking men's minds after a 
long sleep, the hills first and afterwards the plains ; privi- 
lege and all the interests of the few alarmed and militant ; 
the menace of attack and the preparation of defence ; the 



ROBESPIERRE 317 

opposition of extremes on either side of the frontier, grow- 
ing at an increasing speed, till at last, each opposite 
principle mutually exciting the other, as armatories their 
magnets, from a little current of opinion rose a force that 
none could resist. The governments of the whole world 
were for the destruction of the French people, and the 
French people were for the rooting out of everything, 
good and evil, which was attached, however faintly, to the 
old regime. 

The rhetoricians passed in the smoke of the fire, un- 
substantial, full of words that could lead and inspire, but 
empty of acts that could govern the storm. From their 
passing, which is as vague as a vision, we hear faintly the 
" Marseillaise " of the Girondins. 

The men of action and of the crisis passed. They 
burnt in the heat they themselves had kindled, but in 
that furnace the nation was run, and forged, and made. 
Then came the armies : France grown cold from the cast- 
ing-pit, but bent upon action, and able to do. 

Wherever France went by, the Revolutionary Thing 
remained the legacy of her conviction and of her power. 
It remains with a kind of iron laughter for those who 
judge the idea as a passing madness. The philosophers 
have decided upon a new philosophy ; the lawyers have 
clearly proved that there has been no change ; the rhetoric 
has been thoroughly laughed down, enthusiasm has grown 
ridiculous, and the men of action are cursed. But in the 
wake of the French march citizens are found who own the 
soil and are judged by an equal code of laws ; nationalities 
have been welded, patriotism has risen at the call of the 
new patriotic creed ; Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, 
Italy have known themselves as something more than the 
delimitations of sovereigns. Nor was there any abomina- 
tion of the old decay, its tortures, its ignominies, its 
privileges, its licensed insults, or its slaveries, but she 
utterly stamped them out. In Germany, in Austria, in 



3i8 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Italy, they disappeared. Only in one dark corner they 
remained — the great Northern field, where France herself 
grew powerless from cold, and from whence an unknown 
rule and the advance of relentless things menaces Europe 
now. 

But with the mention of that frozen place there comes 
a thought older than all our theories — the mourning for 
the dead. Danton helped to make us, and was killed: 
his effort has succeeded, but the tragedy remains. The 
army at whose source he stood, the captain who inherited 
his action, were worn out in forging a new world. And I 
will end this book by that last duty of mourning, as we 
who hold to immortality yet break our hearts for the 
dead. 

There is a legend among the peasants in Russia of a 
certain sombre, mounted figure, unreal, only an outline 
and a cloud, that passed away to Asia, to the east and to 
the north. They saw him move along their snows 
through the long mysterious twilights of the northern 
autumn in silence, with the head bent and the reins in 
the left hand loose, following some enduring purpose, 
reaching towards an ancient solitude and repose. They 
say it was Napoleon. After him there trailed for days 
the shadows of the soldiery, vague mists bearing faintly 
the forms of companies of men. It was as though the 
cannon-smoke of Waterloo, borne on the light west wind 
of that June day, had received the spirits of twenty years 
of combat, and had drifted farther and farther during the 
fall of the year over the endless plains. 

But there was no voice and no order. The terrible 
tramp of the Guard and the sound that Heine loved, the 
dance of the French drums, was extinguished ; there was 
no echo of their songs, for the army was of ghosts and 
was defeated. They passed in the silence which we can 
never pierce, and somewhere remote from men they sleep 
in bivouac round the most splendid of human swords. 



APPENDIX 



APPENDIX 



NOTE ON THE CORDELIERS 

The spot once occupied by the Cordeliers is among the most in- 
teresting in Paris, and it is of some importance to sketch its 
history and to reconstruct its appearance at greater length than 
was possible in the text. 

All the land from St. Germains des Prfes up northwards along 
the hillside had belonged to that abbey since its foundation, 
when the first dynasty of Frankish kings had endowed the 
foundation with a great estate carved out of what had once been 
the Roman fiscal lands on the south bank. Round the abbey 
itself a few houses had gathered, forming the "Faubourg" (or 
suburb) of " St. Germains " ; but the greater part of the estate was 
open field and meadow. When Philip Augustus built his great 
wall round Paris it cut through the estate, leaving the Church 
and Abbey of St. Germains outside the city, but enclosing a small 
part of the fields within its boundary. 

You may trace the line of the wall at this day by noting the 
street "Rue de Monsieur le Prince," once called "Rue des Fosses 
Monsieur le Prince," and running on the line of the outer ditch. 
The wall ran not twenty yards east of the modern street and 
exactly parallel to it. A portion of it may yet be seen in that 
neighbourhood, a great hollow round built into the wall of one 
of the houses, a cobbler's shop in the Cour du Commerce ; it is 
one (the last, I believe) of the half-towers which flanked Philip 
Augustus's wall. 

In the beginning of the thirteenth century, very shortly after 

the death of St. Francis, the first preachers of the new Order 

321 2- 



322 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

which he had founded came to Paris. It was the moment when 
the University was climbing up the hill, building its colleges, 
having possessed its charter for some years, and already a strong, 
organised, wealthy, and therefore conservative body. This order 
of preachers, wandering, intensely new, and founded by a mystic 
whose place in Christendom was not yet finally determined, were 
bound to come into collision with the spirit of the place. It 
must be remembered that the thirteenth century was not tran- 
sitional, but, on the contrary, a time of settled order. For a 
century it had known the Roman law; it had everywhere the 
Gothic architecture ; it had systemised and made legal the rough 
accidents of feudal custom ; it was wealthy, proud, and successful. 
On it there falls one of those creations which are only possible in 
a time of energy, and yet which almost invariably quarrel with 
the period that has produced them. An Order devoted to sim- 
plicity, making of holy poverty the foundation of the inner life, 
specially created for the poor (whom the growing differentiation 
of society was beginning to debase), the early Franciscans were 
essentially revolutionary, because they built on the great founda- 
tions of all active and permanent reform — I mean the appetite for 
primitive conditions, and the determination to break through the 
net of complexity which the long growths of time weave about a 
conservative society. 

The rich Abbey of St. Germains gave them asylum. It was 
proud to possess dependants, it was great enough to afford bene- 
volent experiments, and it took pleasure in offending the Univer- 
sity, which was an upstart in its eyes, and was beginning to show 
as a powerful rival in the affairs of the south side of Paris. The 
Franciscans, therefore — whom the populace already called the 
"Cordeliers" from the girdle of rope about their habit — were 
permitted to settle in that little corner of their estate which had 
been cut off by the building of the town wall, and they occupied 
a triangle of which the wall formed the south-western, a lane 
(afterwards called " Rue des Cordeliers ") the northern, and an 
irregular Hne bounding one of the University estates the south- 
eastern side. 

This was in 1230. St. Louis was still a boy of fifteen. The 
little foundation was, for the University, nothing but an unwel- 
come neighbour whom it could not oust, and for the Abbey of 



APPENDIX I 323 

St. Germains nothing but a guest. Their provisional tenure did 
not permit them a peal of bells nor a public cemetery. 

St. Louis, however, grew into a manhood which, for all its 
piety, had a wonderful grasp of the society around it. The saint 
who was never clerical, and the Capetian who in all things was 
rather for the spirit than the letter, became their principal sup- 
port. The Papacy, having once (though reluctantly) recognised 
the Franciscan movement in the interview between Innocent III, 
and its founder, continued in the succeeding generation to protect 
it. From a distance, where the quarrels of the University affected 
it little, the Holy See decided more than one dispute in favour of 
the new-comers, and the Franciscans of Paris flourished exceed- 
ingly. By 1240 the full privileges of an independent foundation 
were granted. They have their public service, their cemetery, 
and their bells. St. Louis helps them to build a new chapel by 
giving them, in 1267, part of the great fine which he levied on 
Enguerrand de Coucy. They succeed at last in obtaining the 
recognition of the University ; they are permitted to teach ; they 
number among their lecturers Duns Scotus and St. Bonaventure ; 
and they become one of the most famous of the colleges. 

During the Middle Ages (apart from certain minor structures 
and a few private houses which had been permitted to rise on 
their land, and which were technically known as the "depen- 
dances "), three principal groups of buildings marked the founda- 
tions. First, the monastery itself, a somewhat irregular mass, 
running (as a whole) north and south, and separated from the 
Hue des Cordeliers by a little court or garden. Secondly, running 
from the northern end of this convent, and forming, as it were, a 
letter L with the main building, was the chapel, lying, of course, 
east and west, and forming the southern side of the Eue des 
Cordeliers, upon which was the principal porch. Thirdly, run- 
ning also east and west, but separated from the other buildings by 
a short space, was the hall. 

This famous monument, the only part of the college that has 
been preserved, stood well back from the street, and in the middle 
of the convent grounds. It was on the eastern side of the monas- 
tery, and hence in the ground plan balanced (so to speak) the 
church, which lay to the west of that main building; this was so 
designed that its western end faced about the middle of the college. 



324 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

I have called it a hall because its use exactly corresponded to 
that of our college halls in the English universities. I mean, it 
■was at once a refectory and lecture-room. It was approached by 
a little lane running up through the grounds under the side of the 
convent, later hemmed in with houses. 

Here not only were the voices of the great scholars heard and 
the subtleties of the fourteenth century, but also Etienne Marcel 
called the States General of 1357. From hence that Danton of 
the mediaeval invasion sent out his messengers to the Feudality. 
Here the District gathered for the elections of 1789; here the 
Club met in 1791 and urged the debate that finally produced the 
Eepublic of the next year. It was here also that the three watch- 
words of the Eepublic were devised; here Herbert veiled the 
Declaration; and here the last few words of 1794 were spoken. 
Here the century, which owes more perhaps to that site than to 
any place in France, has collected a museum of surgery, where you 
may see anomalies preserved in spirits, skeletons hung on wires, 
and other objects, interesting rather than sublime. 

As for the college and its estate, they continued for some three 
hundred years — that is, during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and six- 
teenth centuries — to increase in importance. It is a matter of 
common knowledge how soon the pure ideals of St. Francis had 
to compromise with the world. This Order, like all others, became 
wealthy, rooted, and traditional. The Cordeliers, as Paris grew, 
found themselves possessed of a most valuable plot, whose ground- 
value continually increased. They reserved the garden to the 
west, but for the rest — and especially around the buildings and 
along the lanes — houses were built. When the wall of Philip 
Augustus was first embedded by the growth of the city, and 
afterwards in part destroyed, the Cordeliers bought an extension 
to their estate, so that it stretched a little beyond the new street 
of " the Fosses," which had been built on the site of the ditch. 
In 1580 their old thirteenth-century chapel (which must have 
been one of the best bits of early Gothic in Paris) was burnt 
down, and a larger one in the style of the time was put up by the 
piety of Henry IV. Throughout the seventeenth century the 
house seems to have suffered from a decay which continued 
throughout the succeeding hundred years, and culminated in the 
disasters of the Eevolutionary period. They permitted the aliena- 



APPENDIX I 325 

tion of a strip to the west of their grounds, through which the 
municipality drove in 1673 the new street which, in compliment 
to the Order, they called " Rue de I'Observance," after the name 
of their rule. 

With this exception no important change occurred to change 
the aspect of the quarter until the Revolutionary period with 
which we have to deal. 

We are, after this general description, in a position to recog- 
nise the site of the Cordeliers in modern Paris. As you go down 
the Boulevard St. Germains, just before you reach the Boulevard 
St. Michel (going east), you see a street leading off at a slight 
angle to the right. It is the Eue de I'Ecole de M^decine, the 
college after which it is named facing both on this street and on 
the Boulevard. This street is merely the Rue des Cordeliers 
broadened and modernised. As you go a few yards up this street, 
you see on your left the great court of the college, and if you 
stand at its gate and look at the opposite side of the street, at 
the new buildings which are now the lecture-rooms and theatres 
of the Faculty, you are looking at the site of the old church, 
which has disappeared during this century. The street has been 
broadened by taking down the southern side, so that the church 
would actually have overlapped the modern street. Continuing, 
you pass on your right the open yard leading up to what was 
the hall of the Cordeliers, and is now the museum of surgery 
(the Mus^e Dupuytren), and a few yards farther brings you into 
the Boulevard St. Michel. Following this very broad avenue for 
twenty yards at the most, you may note a new street, the " Rue 
Racine," turning off to the right. This did not exist in Danton's 
time, but it lies nearly on the line that separated the Cordeliers 
from the College d'Harcourt (at present the Lyc^e St. Louis). As 
a fact, the line was a trifle to the south of the Rue Racine, and of 
course more irregular. The Rue Racine in its turn leads you into 
that old street the " Rue de Monsieur le Prince." If you turn 
again to the right and go down this some hundred yards, you are 
still following the boundary of the Cordeliers, till you reach the 
"Rue Antoine Dubois." This is identical with the old "Rue 
de I'Observance," spoken of above, and a few steps down this 
short street leads you to the starting-point in the *' Rue de I'Ecole 



326 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

de M^decine." Such a modern itinerary would describe as nearly 
as is now possible the circumference of the college and estate of 
the Cordeliers. The quadilateral comprised by these four streets, 
the Rue de I'Ecole de Medecine, the Rue Racine, the Rue M. de 
le Prince, and the Rue Antoine Dubois, is the site of the famous 
convent and its grounds. 

To reproduce the quarter in 1788 we have to imagine the 
following changes : — The Rue de I'Ecole de Medecine, very nar- 
row, flanked for the greater part of its southern side with the 
church and old wall of the convent. It leads into a little narrow 
street called the "Rue de la Harpe," which went right up the 
hill, and would correspond to a strip taken in the exact centre of 
the present Boulevard St. Michel. The first few buildings here, 
notably the Church of St. Come, were still on the Cordeliers' 
estate. Just above them, however, began the grounds and build- 
ings of the " College d'Harcourt." As we have observed, the Rue 
Racine did not exist, nor anything corresponding to it. To follow 
the boundaries of the estate you would have had to let yourself in 
by a side-door, and then you might have followed a long, irregular 
wall which separated their land from the College d'Harcourt. 
This wall, after passing through a great garden, came out on the 
Rue Monsieur le Prince, and the rest of one's circuit would be 
much what it is to-day. 

Finally, to see the building as Danton saw it, you must 
imagine a half-deserted place, rich, but somewhat unfrequented, 
like certain old legal Inns that once stood in London, old walls 
appearing here and there from between houses of a century's date ; 
a mass of irregular buildings, of garden and of private house 
hopelessly intermingled; while up a narrow and dark passage 
stood the HaU, which was stiU the best preserved part of the 
college, and with which alone his name is associated. 



II 

NOTE ON CERTAIN SITES MENTIONED IN 
THIS BOOK 

It may be of interest to those who desire to study with some par- 
ticularity the personal history of Danton to know where are to he 
found in modern Paris the places with which we have found him 
personally connected in this book. 

His first offices were in the Eue des Mauvaises Paroles. This 
street has disappeared in the improvements which included the 
prolongation of the Eue de Eivoli. This office in the Eue des 
Mauvaises Paroles occupied almost exactly the same spot, which 
can be recognised to-day in the following manner. As you go 
along the northern side of the Eue de Eivoli going east, you come 
to a point 500 yards or so from the Louvre, from whence you begin 
to see the Tour St. Jacques just peering round the southern 
side of the street. The shops which are then upon your left hand 
and the pavement upon which you stand correspond to the position 
of the old mansard house in which Danton served his apprentice- 
ship. It was here that he had his first offices ; it was from this 
that he bought the business of Monsieur M. de Paisy in the Eue 
de la Tissanderie. 

Concerning the position of these offices in the Rue de la Tis- 
sanderie, which he moved into, I have been able to learn nothing. 
There is a curious little record in the police archives of Paris — 
Danton complaining that he could not work on account of the 
noise that a saddle-maker made in the exercise of his trade in the 
same house. In this little document, which is quoted by Monsieur 
Claretie in his " Life of Camille Desmoulins." the house is men- 
tioned as being "just opposite the Eue des Deux Portes" ; but as 
an inference to be drawn from the same record is that he left 
immediately after for some other lodging in the same street, this 

does not help us much. 

327 



328 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

I have said in tlie text that Danton lived, during the six years 
which "were those of his active political life, in a house of the 
Passage du Commerce. I have also mentioned in the text the 
fact that Dr. Eobinet mentions a short residence in the Rue 
des Fosses Saint Germains. I have given, moreover, in the 
same passage my reasons for following M. Aulard in rejecting 
this first address. It seems proved that, after he left the Eue de 
la Tissanderie, he moved with his wife to the corner house of the 
Passage du Commerce. This was his home during the whole of 
the Revolution, and it is worth while to describe its position and 
character with some care. 

In the first place, it has disappeared ; the construction of the 
Boulevard St. Germains destroyed all that end of the Cour du 
Commerce. If you are going along the Boulevard St. Germains 
from the west towards the University, you pass on the right the 
statue of Danton. It is erected on an open triangle of ground, 
formed by the junction of the Boulevard and of the Rue de I'Ecole 
de M^decine. The apex of this triangle, not twenty yards from 
the statue, marks the site of the old house in which Danton and 
Desmoulins lived, and in which they were arrested before their 
trial. 

The old quarter was a network of narrow streets, and where 
the Boulevard St. Germain now stands, an intricate block of 
houses, with courtyards and passages, not unlike the similar 
intricate masses which you wUl find in the City of London, 
formed the northern side of the Rue des Cordeliers (that is to 
say, the modern Rue de I'Ecole de Medecine). A narrow alley, 
known as the Cour de Commerce, joined this Rue des Cordeliers 
by a still narrower passage. Danton's house was the corner house, 
as is proved by the mention in the inventory that some rooms 
looked upon this passage and some upon the Rue des Cordeliers. 

Of course he did not occupy the whole of it, but, in the Parisian 
custom, which had already obtained for more than a century, he 
took a flat, and two rooms (used as a lumber and as a servant's 
bedroom) were added from the entresole below. This flat was 
just such an apartment as a similar bourgeois householder would 
have in Paris to-day : a dining-room, two bedrooms, a study, a 
little library, a drawing-room, a kitchen, and offices, built round 
the staircase and courtyard or well of the house. 



APPENDIX II 329 

I have been unable to find any mention of the rental which 
was paid, but a guess at something like ;^i5o a year in that 
quarter at that time for such a flat would, I think, not be 
extravagant. The corresponding flat above, Desmoulins took 
after his romantic marriage in December 1790, but he did not 
begin to occupy the house until the early part of 179 1. It was 
here that his little Horace was born ; it was here that his wife 
and Danton's passed the terrible night of the loth of August, and 
it was here, in the great bedroom overlooking the Eue des Cor- 
deliers, that Danton's wife died in February 1793. 

As to the furniture of the little apartment, it may be described 
as follows : — The drawing-room was not very large, but there had 
been spent upon it the most considerable sum in the furnishing 
of the house. It figures for very nearly a third in the valuation, 
which may be read in Appendix YII. The white furniture, which 
was the mark of the eighteenth century, was its principal note ; it 
is also worth observing that the household was sufliciently cramped 
for room to use the cupboards in the drawing-room as wardrobes. 
The principal bedroom was well furnished, but, as you will find 
to be the case in such houses in Paris, the study, the dining-room, 
and the spare room to the side of the study were very bare. It 
is also remarkable that the lumber-room held nothing but two 
trunks and an old double bedstead. It was the household of a 
man who made every effort to maintain his position before his 
wife's friends, but who was not wealthy, and who had evidently 
arranged the scale of his expenditure considerably below the 
probable receipts which an office such as his would have brought 
in. I should much doubt whether as much as ^S'^° ^ Y®^^ would 
go out on such an establishment, though he was certainly receiving 
;!^iooo. We know the reason of this ; he had to pay ofi" by every 
means in his power the debt which he had incurred in buying the 
practice. "While he lived in this house, and until the office was 
suppressed in 1790, he continued to keep his business rooms in 
the Rue de la Tissanderie. It may be worthy of mention that 
he kept two servants, and that his apartment was on the first, 
whilst that of Desmoulins was on the second floor of the house. 

As to the Cordeliers, on which the preceding note is written, 
the hall in which their meetings were first held still exists (as 
we have said in the text) under the title of Mus^e Dupuytren. 



330 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

The Churcli of the Cordeliers, into which they afterwards moved, has 
disappeared, but the last locale of the club (when the Municipality 
had turned them out of the church in 1791) still remains, and is 
to be discovered at No. 105 Eue Thionville. Danton's father-in- 
law had been master of a caf6 on the Quai de I'Ecole. This house 
still remains. If I am not mistaken, it was altered slightly during 
the restorations of the Second Empire. It is the house which now 
stands at the south-western corner of the Place de I'Ecole, and 
which faces the quai on one side and the square on the other. 
The street and quay outside M. Charpentier's cafe was, however, 
somewhat oblique to the modern street, and ran less east than 
west, more south-east than north-west, than it does to-day. 

The quay has been raised and the old fountain in the Place 
de I'Ecole destroyed. Otherwise the quarter is much the same. 
The caf6 became famous later for its draught players, a reputation 
that still continues. 



Ill 

NOTE ON THE SUPPOSED VENALITY OF 
DANTON 

I WILL not go in this note into any of the general considerations 
which have led the greater part of modern historians to reject the 
legend of Danton's venality. These general considerations are by 
far the strongest arguments upon which we can rely in this matter, 
but I trust that the character which I have attempted to draw in 
the text of the book will furnish them in sufficiency. 

Neither do I desire to insist in this note upon the unquestion- 
able value of the two principal modern authorities in England and 
in France (Mr. Morse Stephens and M. Aulard), who both of 
them regard the question as finally settled in Danton's favour. I 
have insisted sufficiently upon this in the text. What I shall 
attempt to do is to quote the contemporary accusations, to deter- 
mine how much reliance can be placed upon them, to show their 
character, and to describe in what way and to what extent they 
are explained by documents which have since come to light. 

First of all, a list of those contemporaries who took his venality 
for certain. It is very formidable. 

Mirabeau (letter to Lamarck, Thursday, loth March 1791).-- 

. . . "Montmorin has told me ... of particular schemes . . . 

for instance, that Beaumetz and . . . D'Andr^e dined yesterday 

alone and got Danton's confidence . . . and then proposed to 

demolish Vincennes in order to make themselves popular. Danton 

got 30,000 livres yesterday, and I have the proof that Danton 

inspired the last number of Desmoulins' paper. ... If it is 

possible I intend to risk 6000 livres, but at any rate they will 

be more innocently distributed than the 30,000 livres of Danton." 

Here is a categorical statement in which a man says what the 

court had often said (and Mirabeau was then an agent of the 

331 



332 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

court), " I have managed Danton at such and such a price," and 
the passage gives us indirectly the name of Montmorin. The date 
should be noted. 

Bertrand de MoUeville, a far less practical and a far less 
careful man than Mirabeau, also a singularly untrustworthy 
authority, has the following : — Memoirs Particuliers, i. 354. — "By 
the hands of this man Durand, under the ministry of De Mont- 
morin, Danton received more than 50,000 francs to propose certain 
motions of the Jacobins. He was fairly faithful in keeping this 
contract, but stipulated that he should be left free as to the means 
he employed." . . . Again . . . "In the first debates upon the 
king's trial the infamous Danton, whose services had been so dearly 
paid out of the Civil List, was one of those who displayed the 
greatest violence. I was the more alarmed as this scoundrel was 
at the moment (Autumn 1 792) a most powerful and dangerous man 
in the Assembly. The ardent zeal which I felt for the safety of the 
king, and which would have made me think all means legitimate, 
suggested this means against Danton to neutralise the rage of the 
monster ; and though the method I took required a lie, I did not 
hesitate to employ it without the least scruple. I wrote to him 
on the nth December: — 'I must not leave you ignorant. Sir, of 
the fact that I have found in the papers of the late Monsieur 
Montmorin notes of the dates of the sums which have been paid 
out of the secret service money, including a receipt in your hand- 
writing. Hitherto I have made no use of this document, but I 
warn you that I have enclosed them in a letter which I am writing 
to the President of the Convention, and I will have them printed 
and placarded on the corners of the streets if you do not conduct 
yourself well in the trial of the king.' As a fact, Montmorin had 
shown me these papers a year before, though he had not given 
them to me. But Danton knew they existed, and knew how 
intimate had been my relations with Montmorin. He did not 
reply to the letter, but I saw in the published prints that he had 
got himself named deputy in a mission to the army of the ISTorth. 
He only returned at the end of the king's trial, and contented 
himself with voting for death without giving any opinion." 
(Particular Memoirs, ii. 288-291.) I would have the reader to 
specially mark this extract, to which I shall return at the end of 
my note, as it can be easily proved by internal evidence to be a 



APPENDIX III 333 

falsehood. It is, indeed, of more value to any one who desires to 
write a life of Bertrand himself, than it is to one who is writing 
the life of Danton. 

Thirdly, Lafayette says (Memoirs, iii. 83-85) : " Danton, whose 
receipt for 100,000 francs was in the hands of Montmorin, 
asked for Lafayette's head; that was running a great risk, but he 
depended on the discretion of Lafayette and on his keeping a 
secret. For Lafayette to have spoken would have been to have 
signed the death-warrant of Montmorin, who had paid Danton in 
order to moderate his anarchic fury." And again (iv. 328-330), 
he says of Danton : " He was a vulgar tribune and incapable of 
turning the masses from evil by persuasion or by respect, but he 
knew how to flatter their passions, &c. &c. ... I knew him 
from the first week of the Revolution in the district of Cordeliers, 
whither I had been attracted. After the 6th October he took 
money from Montmorin, whom he caused in consequence to be 
assassinated on the 2nd September. In connection with this 
secret he said to me once, ' General, I know you do not know me, 
I am more of a Monarchist than you.' ... I have learnt since 
from the person to whom Madame Elizabeth told it that he had 
received, about the loth August, a considerable sum to give the 
movement a direction in the king's favour, and, indeed, he got the 
royal family sent to the Temple. He said to a friend of the king, 
* It is I who will save him or kill him.' " 

Fourthly, there is Brissot (iv. 193-194). "Among the stipen- 
diaries of Orleans was . . . Danton. I have seen the receipt for 
500,000 francs which were paid him by Montmorin. He was 
sold to the court in order to thrust the Eevolution into the 
excesses which would make it odious to the great bulk of French- 
men." 

Fifthly, Madame Eoland (who has so much to say against a 
character so profoundly antipathetic to her) has this special 
passage on his corruption (Dauban's edition, 1864, pp. 254-255): 
"He went to Belgium to augment his wealth, and dared to 
admit a fortune of 1,400,000 francs, to assume luxury," &c. &c. 

Sixthly (if it is worth quoting), among the papers that 
Robespierre left, in the notes that formed the basis of St. Just's 
report, are the words — "Danton owed an obligation to Mirabeau; 
it was Mirabeau who got him repaid the price of his practice. It 



334 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

has even been said that he was paid twice. I heard him admit 
to Fabre certain thefts of shoes belonging to the army." 

Such are the contemporary accusations. There are the follow- 
ing points to be noted with regard to them. 'Ho one says that he 
himself paid money ; the sums of money are very various. They 
are paid, according to some, on a few definite occasions ; according 
to others, upon all occasions. Finally, every accusation that has 
any definite basis at all pivots round the name of Montmorin. 
"Montmorin held the receipt," "Montmorin told me," and so 
forth, Now, if we remember that Montmorin held the receipt for 
a legitimate and open reimbursement (see Appendix VI.), and then 
compare the accusations with what we know of the men and of 
the time, if we then proceed to check these merely general conclu- 
sions by matters of absolute knowledge drawn from the valuations 
upon Danton's estate at various moments of his life, we shall agree 
with the more modern authorities who have worked with the 
documents before them, that Danton is innocent of actions to 
the charge of which his uncertain temper and his lack of solid 
social surroundings laid him open. 

In the first place, let us consider the words of the accusations 
which appear above, and which include all those of any importance. 

That of Mirabeau is what you would expect from such a man ; 
it is quiet, contemptuous, treating of Danton as something on the 
very last level of the time. But if we take the specific accusation 
and separate it from all general points of view, we find this much : 
that Montmorin has been talking to him with regard to what 
"those fellows" were doing. "In connection with this," says 
Mirabeau, "Danton got 30,000 yesterday" to work such and such 
a political move. The grave feature in the quotation is the way 
in which Mirabeau, who understood men and who had a good 
grasp of Paris, treats Danton's venality as being something well 
laiown, gives a particular example of it, and passes at once to 
other things. But the specific accusation is hearsay from Mont- 
morin, and, as I have said, it is always Montmorin's name which 
crops up when this gossip is on foot. 

I would, therefore, sum up the value of Mirabeau's accusation 
somewhat as foUows : — "If we could prove that Danton was a 
spendthrift, and that large sums of money passed through his 
hands for his personal pleasures, then Mirabeau's chance remark, 



APPENDIX III 335 

while it would be worthless in a court of law, ought to have some 
small weight before history. Mirabeau was (on a higher plane) a 
hon viveur such as Danton was reputed to be, and the circles in 
which the men moved touched each other especially in the point 
of their good living ; but if we can find that Danton did not, as a 
fact, spend nor invest great sums of money, then the accusation 
is simply a common error based upon a remark of Montmorin's, 
suited to the current impression of Danton's character, but dis- 
proved by the known facts of Danton's life. 

Bertrand de Molleville's accusation is of particular value to 
any one who is concerned, as I am, in attempting to get to the truth 
in this matter. It is the only one which is perfectly categorical 
and detailed. In proportion as it is categorical and detailed it is 
untrue. If you wish to know whether a man has committed a 
certain crime, and you hear a number of witnesses against him, one 
of whom only gives careful evidence with dates, details, and so 
forth, and if you can then prove that this witness has lied upon 
aU the points which supported his principal accusation, you are 
in a fair way to winning your case, 

De Molleville begins by making the sum 500,000 francs. It 
seems enormous. It is a sum which no man could receive and 
spend in a few days' debauch without attracting the attention of 
the whole city, which no man could invest without leaving some 
obvious accession of property, and he puts the receipt of this sum 
as coming under Montmorin's ministry — that is, at a time when 
public order was secured, when the course of the registries, the 
transmission of property and so forth, were in the fullest light. 

He gives the name of the man who handed him the sum, and 
calls him Durand. On this point it is impossible to say yes or no, 
but we can say with absolute certitude that the incident of the 
letter upon which Bertrand de Molleville makes the whole matter 
turn, is an untruth added to an untruth. In the first place, he 
makes Danton "violent in his demands against the king." This 
accusation is absolutely false. 

When the trial of the king was mooted, Danton did speak 
(notably on the 6th of September), with some decision in favour 
of the king's being brought to trial upon particular points. He 
expressed himself in that speech with very great energy upon 
this particular feature of the trial, that the king merited con- 



336 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

demnation because he had obviously and openly betrayed the 
nation, — a thing which nobody doubted, which nobody denied, 
and which Louis himself and his advisers would simply have 
met by saying (at a later epoch of course), "We called in the 
foreigner as a necessary police in the time of anarchy; we 
desired to save France by its betrayal." So far, however, from 
Danton being a leader of the attack on Louis or of the demand 
for his trial, that attack and that demand were as spontaneous as 
anything the Convention ever did ; and Danton followed rather 
than led, as a glance at the Moniteur can prove. 

In the much more important debates wherein the life of Louis 
was first implicitly and then explicitly at stake, Danton was 
absent, and in the days of November there is no question at all 
but that Danton's one preoccupation was to reconcile the Mountain 
with the Girondins. 

De MoUeville goes on to give his letter a date — such things 
are done on purpose, as a rule, in order to give a special character 
of legal evidence to one's accusations. He says that he wrote the 
letter on the nth of December, that Danton on receiving the 
letter was frightened, and without replying to it got himself put 
upon the mission to the army of the North. 

Now Danton left for the army of the North on the ist of 
December, and if the letter was written at all (which I doubt), 
it was written at a time when Danton, being absent, could not 
possibly have acted as De MoUeville said he did. He could not 
have " asked " to go on a mission (he did not ask, but was sent), 
and have started on the ist in consequence of a letter written on 
the nth. 

Finally, De MoUeville says he came back to vote on the 
punishment of the king, but had been coerced by the letter into 
merely voting for death without giving his opinion. This again 
is a lie. If there is anything remarkable to the historian in the 
vote Danton gave on the i6th January 1793, and in the speech 
which he made before his vote, it is that he, by nature so wary, 
should have discovered in this crisis a violent manifestation of 
opinion and motive. I have amply shown in the text that we 
could only reconcile those abnormal days in Danton's life by some 
extreme shock to the emotions. Some represent him as suffering 
a violent rebuff from his political opponents; some consider the 



APPENDIX III 337 

scene of misery and impending death, which he found in his home 
on returning from his long journey. He demanded a simple 
majority vote ; he spoke violently against the appeal to the people ; 
and when he voted for the death of the king he turned to the 
Eight and said, " I am not a statesman ; I am not one of those 
who are ignorant of the duty of not compromising with tyrants, 
and who do not know that kings can only be struck on the head, 
who do not know that we can expect nothing from the kings of 
Europe save by force and by arms. I vote for the death of the 
tyrant." 

If these are the words, and if that is the action of a man 
terrorised by a letter into a silent and furtive vote, then evidence 
has no meaning. 

De Molleville, I think, can in this, as in nearly all his his- 
torical evidence (with the exception of that which turns upon the 
personal habits of the king, where he has the details of a valet), 
be dismissed. 

With Lafayette, again, we have that half-truth and half-lie 
which runs through all his accusations. "The receipt for 100,000 
francs was in the hands of Montmorin." This was true. The 
sum was not quite 100,000, it was 61,000 (Appendix VI.) ; but 
the receipt did exist, and to any one who did not know that all 
the men occupying positions on the Council had been reimbursed, 
it might look like a receipt for a bribe, or might be twisted into 
meaning such. It is impossible for us to discover whether La- 
fayette meant to tell an untruth, as we can prove De Molleville 
did ; he may in this matter have been perfectly loyal, for there 
was a note found among his papers after his death (Memoirs, iii. 
84-85), saying that " a position on the Councils was only worth 
10,000, and had been reimbursed at 100,000 as a bribe." We 
now know from the discovery of so many receipts that from 
60,000 to 80,000 was the regular price of reimbursements, but 
Lafayette might easily have been ignorant of this, and have 
jumped to a false conclusion. 

As to his mention of Madame Elizabeth's having told the man 
who told him that Dan ton had been paid before the loth August, 
the old man's memory is certainly turning to the remark which 
many witnesses heard from the lips of that saintly woman just 
before the attack on the Tuileries, when she said with simplicity 

y 



338 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

(she knew nothing at all of the characters of the Revolution save 
what she might hear from the courtiers), *' Well, we can count on 
Danton; he has heen paid." That is not evidence. If Danton 
was paid to make the loth of August turn in favour of the 
monarchy, and if, as Lafayette hints, he had attempted to make it 
so turn, he certainly took the most extraordinary way of defend- 
ing his employers. One might as well say that Lord Chatham's 
principal object in the taking of Quebec was the defence of the 
French power in Canada. For the loth of August was openly 
and directly an attack upon the ancient crown of France, to over- 
throw it and to substitute in its place a new regime, and Danton 
worked at it as indefatigably as a general before a battle would 
work. 

The remark, " General, I am more monarchist than you," reads 
to me like truth; it is exactly what Danton would have said. 
He despised Lafayette as much as any one man can despise 
another. He believed right up to the moment of the war that 
the existing fact of the monarchy was worth all the theories in 
the world as a nucleus for the new regime, and he saw the 
emptiness of Lafayette's vanity. He may quite probably have 
met it upon some occasion as direct as that which Lafayette has 
given us, and Lafayette, in the abundance of his folly, may quite 
easily have misunderstood the meaning of his criticism. 

Brissot is an admirable example of how the false rumours 
arose. He says : " I have myself seen the receipts which Mont- 
morin held from Danton." 

Now, as we have seen, that receipt (to any one who did not 
know the details of the transaction) might quite honestly appear 
a damning piece of evidence, and it is without question the 
document round which the great mass of accusations have been 
built. 

As to Madame Roland, I cannot imagine what flight of feminine 
inaccuracy made her put down a fortune of ;^6o,ooo to her enemy's 
name. If a witness in any other circumstances than revolution 
should tell one that a young lawyer and politician had secretly and 
suddenly become possessed of this sum, he would be reputed mad. 
In such a time, however, anything seems possible to an enemy, 
and we must rely upon the simple fact that Danton can be de- 
finitely proved neither to have spent, invested, nor left a tenth of 



APPENDIX III 339 

such a sum. It seems to me that this accusation of Madame 
Eoland's is on a par with that other extreme remark that she had 
known "the Dantons living on i6s. a week, which they horrowed 
regularly from their father-in-law," and this " at the opening of the 
Revolution," a time when we know him positively to have been 
defending cases involving half a million pounds in the issue of the 
trial, and when we know him to have had for clients some of the 
richest men in France. 

Now, the papers that prove Danton's financial position are 
quite simple. He was cut off suddenly ; they were all seized, and 
they all remain. Unless he spent huge sums in debauch (sums 
like those of Orleans), or unless he buried the money, he cannot 
have received much more than what openly appears. He entered 
his married life with a debt of ;!^2 5oo secured on his office. He 
enjoyed a good practice for four years : he was reimbursed to some- 
what less than the value of his office, and on his death the sum 
sequestrated by the State, and later refunded to his sons, talKes with 
this small fortune. 



IV 

NOTE ON DANTON'S RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE 
MASSACRES OF SEPTEMBER 

The arguments for and against Danton's responsibility in this 
matter must necessarily be of a more general order than those 
which can be advanced for and against his character in regard to 
money matters. There are but one or two really definite facts 
upon either side, and, as the purport of these notes is to deal 
with actualities, I will treat of these known facts only. 

In the first place, it must be clearly understood that Danton 
did not shrink from, and was not unsympathetic with, the extreme 
measures of the Revolution. His position with regard to them is 
perfectly clear in history, and is simply this — his violence was 
persuaded that an exceptional time required, almost as a method 
of government, the most exceptional terrors. 

But, on the other hand, Danton was a man to whom not only 
a useless massacre but a useless anything was detestable. Death 
in itself, the infliction of death on others, even the death to 
which he himself was led, never seemed to him a matter of vast 
moment. It is a common fault in courageous men to have this 
disregard for the life of others and of oneself, but I deny that 
you will ever discover Danton causing the death of a single 
human being unless it is in the furtherance of his policy. 

In the second place, consider what is actually known to have 
proceeded from his mouth, (i) Quite early in the Revolution (in 
June 1 791) he demanded the head of Lafayette, and he pro- 
bably meant it; (2) he boasted of, or confessed to, being the 
author of Mandat's death ; (3) in the course of speeches which 
led up to the establishment of the Revolutionary tribunal he 
speaks in favour of the extreme penalties and of the terror that 
they would inspire, always as a means to an end, and as a means 
to be employed without hesitation. Let me quote but one sen- 



APPENDIX IV 341 

tence from the speech of the loth March 1793 to illustrate what 
I mean : — "I feel to what a degree it is necessary to take judicial 
measures by which we may punish the counter-revolutionaries. 
This tribunal should be erected in order to replace for them the 
supreme tribunal of popular vengeance. It is very difficult to 
define a political crime, but if a man of the common people for 
his sort of misdeed gets punished at once, is it not necessary that 
extreme laws, something out of the common running of our social 
machinery, should be passed to terrify rebels and to strike the 
guilty 1 In this matter the safety of the people demands from 
you extreme methods and the measures of terror." 

Finally, we know that Danton was, on the whole, the guide of 
that earlier part of the Terror between May and August 1793, in 
which (as he thought) the system was doing necessary work 
without which the nation could not have been saved. 

Now, let us set against these what we definitely know of 
Danton's character which would lead us to a conclusion that he 
would not have countenanced massacre. 

No one questions the fact that the leading motive in Danton's 
mind was the establishment of a strong government around or 
in the place of a weak monarchy. He was a true descendant of 
the lawyers of the Code. The massacres of September took place 
at a moment when he was using the whole of his personal energy 
in trying as well as may be to supply that Government. He 
guides the ministry in Paris ; he dominates Roland as a man 
might dominate a woman. It was of supreme importance to such 
a scheme that the thin ice between government and anarchy in 
the days that preceded Valmy should not be broken. The mas- 
sacre* of September broke it; there was a week of anarchy in 
Paris. There is the first great argument against Danton's com- 
plicity with the massacres. 

It must, however, be remembered that a theory exists, by no 
means untenable, which would make Danton argue something in 
this fashion : " Once let the popular fury have full rein against 
what it regards as the internal enemy, and I shall have the dis- 
appearance of that disturbing factor of royalist reaction in Paris, 
while on the part of the mob I shall have the lassitude and shame 
that follow excess ; they are not difficult to govern." It is only a 
personal opinion, but it seems to me that in a mind of Danton's 



342 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

type, downright and practical to excess, such, a far-reaching and 
subtle idea as the last would hardly occur, and that the massacres 
must have produced on him an especial annoyance, because they 
were the breakdown of a system the support of which occupied 
his every effort. 

Secondly, Danton's allusions to the massacres of September 
were always of a more definite and more reasonable nature than 
those of his colleagues. The attitude which he adopts with 
regard to them after their occurrence is this : " There was no 
public force, none of that disciplined government which I postu- 
late as the first necessity of the Revolution ; nothing on earth 
could prevent them, and they occurred in spite of every governing 
power." So much for generalities. 

Now let us turn to one or two points which have been made 
the basis of a definite accusation against Danton in this matter. 

Firstly : that he knew that the massacres were coming, and 
withdrew from prison more than one of his friends on the eve of 
the uprising. This I take to be true, or rather I am certain of it ; 
but one would have to be very ignorant of the time not to know 
that all Paris expected the massacres, and that those who were at 
all in touch with the Commune knew two or three days before 
that anything illegal might be done. To have worked to prevent 
them, in which Danton might have employed his energy, would, 
as I have said in the text, have been to risk that which he 
most desired, and to risk it for the sake of saving the prisoners. 
Certainly he did not desire to save them as passionately as he 
desired to remain at the helm and build up a government; he 
preferred to keep his influence over the city. That accusation 
is just. « 

Secondly, it is affirmed with justice that Danton, from the 
peculiar position of the ministry which he occupied, filled the 
prisons, which were afterwards gutted. It is true that on Danton, 
as Minister of Justice, and above all as a general power in the 
Cabinet, the responsibility of arresting the prisoners rests; but 
was this action taken with a knowledge of what the consequences 
would be nearly a month later 1 Certainly not. It would show 
a complete ignorance of what happened in the last fortnight of 
August to say that an action taken just after the loth was taken 
with a view to something that would occur on the 2nd of Sep- 



APPENDIX IV 343 

tember. The state of public feeling in those four weeks went 
through a most violent crisis, and one might say that the intensity 
of the feeling against the Eoyalists and the foreigners was not 
only a hundred-fold greater when Verdun was actually falling 
than it had been just after the success against the Tuileries, but 
different in quality as well. 

Thirdly, there is one detailed accusation — the circular which 
Marat sent out to the Departments. If it can be proved that this 
circular was approved of, that its distribution was aided by Danton, 
then we shall have a definite piece of evidence which cannot be 
overridden. Now let me describe what that circular was, and 
see how far we must blame circumstances, how far the carelessness, 
and how far the deliberate act of the minister. All the accounts 
are much the same. Madame Eoland says, " Sent out above the 
signature of the Minister of Justice." Bertrand de Molleville is 
also perfectly definite (Memoirs, ix. 310) — "Sent by the minister 
Danton." 

The examination of the documents seventy years later has 
given more accurate results to history than the memoirs of con- 
temporaries, whether they are truthful and enthusiastic like 
Madame Eoland, or frankly dishonest like Bertrand de Molle- 
ville. Bougeart was at the pains of looking up the original 
documents at the archives of the police. What appears in this 
document (Bougeart, pp. 1 21-12 2) is a series of signatures, 
Panis, Sergent, Marat, &c,, that is, the Committee of Surveillance 
appointed by the Commune. There is no trace of any ministerial 
signature, and even the stamp which was used in the office by the 
clerks for everything that passed officially through the Ministry 
of Justice is not attached to the sheet. What did happen was 
this. The circulars were sent out in envelopes which bore the 
official mark of the Ministry. It is as though some act of a body 
in London, let us say, should be distributed to the provinces 
in the blue envelopes of Her Majesty's Service. That is all, 
either for or against Danton, that remains of the incident of the 
circular. 

Now it is certain that Danton had not at that time openly 
broken with Marat. Moreover, Danton had not actually quar- 
relled with the Commune, though he certainly treated it with 
contempt. But Danton had no conceivable object in helping 



344 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Marat to distribute tlie circulars unless he himself was openly on 
Marat's side. A man of his character would either have signed, 
or else, had he known that the circulars were going out, he would 
have forbidden their distribution; he would have taken some 
definite line. Why? Because the distribution of the circular 
was bound to condemn him to a very definite position — ^here is a 
man who has stood aloof from a very violent conspiracy, a con- 
spiracy whose authors came out at last in the open day and 
gloried in what they had done. They wrote the most violent 
of all their manifestoes, containing such phrases as "the 
ferocious prisoners have been put to death by the people ; " " it 
was an act of justice indispensable to our Committee," and so 
forth. It would be quite impossible to send out unwittingly such 
a circular as that without knowing that one was compromising 
oneself and definitely entering the most extreme party of the 
Parisians. It is inconceivable, therefore, that he would have lent 
ofificial envelopes for the purpose, and have said, " So far I will 
help you, but I will not help you more than that." You might 
as well suppose an English official in India, of the stronger kind, 
saying, " I will allow you, an unofficial personage, to send out the 
order for an illegal execution from this office, but I will not put 
my name to it." 

Again, how comes it that this document alone, of all those 
sent from the Minister of Justice at the time, goes out in the 
official envelope, but bears in itself no mark whatsoever of the 
Ministry of Justice ? How was it that the officials in the country 
towns, among the mass of papers that they received from the 
Ministry in Paris, should receive this single one without any 
stamp or signature, and should then discover that it had pro- 
ceeded from a body which had nothing on earth to do with the 
Ministry of Justice ? There are but two replies possible to this 
question — either that the envelopes were taken from the Ministry 
by one of the clerks (several of whom we know to have been 
intimately linked with the Commune), or that Danton timidly 
lent envelopes but refused to do anything further. Of these two 
replies, the second appears to me absolutely at variance not only 
with Danton's own character but also with the general routine of 
a great office. I cannot conceive the Cabinet Minister offering, in 
the very gravest conditions, a few blue envelopes, when a whole 



APPENDIX IV 345 

political party desire from him a definite pronouncement on one 
side or the other. 

Finally, it may he asked, could these envelopes go out without 
his knowledge? To that I answer that such a thing might he 
done from any government office to-day. It was, moreover, a 
time of revolution ; the whole complicated organism had been 
shaken and partly transformed ; there was confusion in every 
department of the building, and even under these conditions 
Danton was doing far more work than depended upon his office. 
I think, therefore, that it is eminently possible that the circulars 
should have been sent out by one of the clerks without his know- 
ledge; and the fact that no signature was used, and that the 
documents did not even pass through one of the many hands 
whose duty it was to affix the formal stamp, still further corro- 
borates the view that the circulation of the appeal was surrep- 
titious. 

As to the accusations such as that of Lafayette (Memoirs, 
iv. 139, 140), "He commanded the massacre of September and 
paid the murderers, who went all covered with blood to get their 
money from Roland," I attach no importance to them at all. 
Even the phrase in which Danton is supposed to have saluted the 
return of the murderers from Versailles is very doubtful. It does 
not occur in any contemporary account; it is not in the Moni- 
teur ; it is not in the " Eevolutions de Paris ; " Madame Eoland 
does not quote it, even on hearsay ; it is not one of Peltier's 
inventions, and I have some difficulty in tracing it to its origin. 

I think, then, that the general position of Danton during the 
days of September may be summed up as foUows. He did not 
regard the lives of the prisoners as being of the first importance ; 
he did not use what would have been to his certain knowledge a 
useless energy in protesting ; he did not (as he might conceivably 
have done) form a special and vigorous tribunal to replace that 
which was on the point of acquitting L. de Montmorin. By all 
those, therefore, who would regard public order and a security for 
life as being more important than the success of a political idea, 
or the integrity and defence of a nation, he can be accused of a 
criminal negligence in the matter of the massacres of September. 
He certainly cannot be accused of having designed them ; he 
cannot be accused on any definite proof of having approved them, 



346 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

and he cannot be accused of having failed to share in the regret 
and misery which that terrible blunder caused. If we may judge 
the attitude of his mind by comparing it with that of contem- 
poraries, rather than by comparing it with our own attitude in a 
time of security and order, we may say that the massacres taught 
him a more definite lesson than they taught to Roland, for they 
caused him to pursue a policy of conciliation and to strengthen 
the government; that, on the other hand, he did less to stop 
them than Manuel did ; and that in a comparison with men whom 
we know to have been honest, such as Roland himself, or by a 
contrast with men whom we know to have been evil, such as 
Hubert, or whom we know to have been frenzied, such as Marat — 
judged in the midst of aU this, Danton will appear responsible to 
history for having been guilty of indifference at a moment when 
he might have saved his reputation by protesting, though perhaps 
his protest would not have saved a single life. 



The object of tlie remainder of this Appendix is to pro- 
vide for the reader certain documents that illustrate the 
statements and the line of argument in the text. Of 
these documents but few have been translated, because 
only a few appeal to any one but a special student of the 
Revolution, or are necessary to the understanding of this 
book. 

By far the most important of the documents here 
printed is the last, Barrere's report of the 29th of May 
1793. Hitherto unpubhshed, it furnishes (to my mind) 
the most complete explanation of the somewhat com- 
pUcated manoeuvres pursued by the Committee, manoeuvres 
which permitted the revolution of May 31st and June 2nd. 

To each document a short preface has been attached 
for the purpose of explaining its origin and of mentioning 
the authorities (if any) in which it can be found. 



SHORT MEMOIR by A. R. C. de St. ALBIN 

This memoir was publislied for tlie first time as an article 
in tlie Critique Frangaise of tlie I5tli of March 1864. 
It was so published by the author himself, and, though 
appeariag seventy years after Danton's death, is not with- 
out importance. De St. Albia, who is better known by his 
first name of Rousselia, had some personal acquaintance 
with Danton (though he was but a boy at the time) and he 
lived to a great age. He had, moreover, an acquaintance 
with the family after the Revolutionary period. These 
circumstances make his testimony decisive on all non-con- 
troversial points and valuable on many others. 

The criticisms to be made against his account are 
obvious. It is too florid ; it errs also in giving an amiable 
and somewhat mediocre character to the statesman him- 
self and to all his relatives and surroundings. We have 
ui it but a poor expression of the energy that was Danton's 
chief character, and which the writer's own mind cannot 
reflect. It was, moreover, written so very long after the 
events which it describes that in more than one place an 
error of date or number has been committed; especially 
in the incident of Barentin at the close of the memoir, 
with which M. Aulard finds so much fault, and in the 
amount of his wife's dowry, which was not 40,000 but only 
20,000 livres. On the other hand, it is fresh, full of per- 
sonal recollections, written by a trustworthy man, and 
gives many interesting details on the earlier and less 
known part of Danton's life. 

347 



348 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

" La famille de Danton n'a point k se pr^valoir d'une antique 
noblesse. Le nom de Danton est commun dans la contree 
d'Arcia-sur-Aube, il est apparu avec un certain bruit, en 1740, 
dans les querelles du Jansenism e. Parmi les pieces de th^tre 
destinies h populariser ces discussions th^ologiques, il en est une 
intitul^e La Banqueroute des marchands de miracles, qui est 
signee du P. Danton. On a suppose, non sans raison, qui cet 
eccl6siastique 6tait un grand-oncle du conventionnel. 

" George- Jacques Danton naquit k Arcis-sur-Aube le 26 octo- 
bre 1759. II ^tait fils de Jacques Danton, procureur au bailliage 
d'Arcis, qui avait 6pous6, en 1754, Jeanne-Madeleine Gamut. 
Le pfere mourut le 24 f^vrier 1762, ag^ d'environ quarante ans, 
laissant sa femme enceinte et quatre enfants en bas age, deux 
filles et deux gargons. Georges-Jacques Danton resta sous la tutelle 
de sa m^re, femme douee de toutes les qualit^s qui commandent 
I'estime. C'est par la sensibility et la douceur du caract^re que 
la m^re de Danton ^levait et gouvernait sa jeune famille. Georges, 
celui de ses enfants dont I'ext^rieur indiquait le plus de force et 
de volonte, ^tait le plus docile envers elle. Sa jeune ind^pendance 
6tait bien vite soumise quand sa m^re parlait k son coeur. La 
tendresse obtenait ce que la crainte aurait vainement tent6 
d'arracher. Madame veuve Danton eut un heureux auxiliaire 
pour le soutien de sa maison dans son p^re, entrepreneur des 
ponts et chaussees de la province de Champagne. Celui-ci donna 
les premieres legons a son petit-fils : il voyait avec joie ses mEiles 
dispositions. 

"II est int^ressant de noter quel fut le milieu dans lequel 
Danton passa ainsi ses premieres ann^es, et nous avons trouv^, dans 
un auteur contemporain, le passage suivant qui nous semble curieux : 

" ' La ville d' Arcis-sur-Aube est compos^e d'hommes ind^pen- 
dants ; I'air y est vif, les hommes sont robustes ; la riviere de 
I'Aube, qui traverse le pays, est navigable en tout temps, le 
commerce maritime occupe les natifs ; quand les marins ne sont 
pas occup^s h. I'eau, ils font des bas ; ils sont laborieux, industrieux. 
Arcis n'est comparable a aucune partie de la Champagne ; les lois 
y sont observ6es comme si elles n'existaient pas, par le seul senti- 
ment de I'ordre ; les seigneurs de I'ancien regime avaient toujours 
rencontr^ des opposants dans des hommes chez qui I'amour de la 
liberty est inn6.' 



APPENDIX V 349 

" L'enfance de Danton n'eut rien de remarquable ; il fut 6ley6, 
suivant I'usage du pays, k pen pr^s comme Tin enfant de la nature. 

" II avait ^te nourri par une vache, ce qui est usiti en Cham- 
pagne, quand les m^res ne sont pas assez fortes pour allaiter leurs 
enfants. La vache nourrice de Danton fut un jour aper^ue par 
un taureau 6chapp^, qui se pr^cipita sur elle et donna au pauvre 
enfant un coup de come qui lui arracha la l^vre. C'est k cette 
cicatrice que tenait la dififormit^ de sa l^vre superieure. 

"En grandissant, Danton, comme tons les etres dou^s d'une 
force extraordinaire, ^prouvait le besoin de I'exercer. II voulut 
un jour faire preuve de vigueur, prendre sa revanche et lutter 
contre un taureau. II 6tait difficile qu'il sortit vainqueur de la 
lutte. Un coup de corne lui ^crasa le nez. 

" Ces accidents auraient du le rendre prudent, mais il n'y a 
gu^re de prudence la ou il y a grande surabondance de vie. Un 
jour le robuste enfant croit pouvoir faire marcher devant lui les 
pores de la ferme qui obstruaient I'entr^e de la maison. II les 
attaque k coups de fouet; mais son pied glisse, il tombe, et les 
pores devenus furieux, se ruent sur lui et lui font une terrible 
blessure, assez semblable k celle dont Boileau fut victime dans 
Bon enfance, au dire d'Helv^tius, qui attribuait a cette blessure la 
disette de sentiment qu'il pretendait remarquer dans les ouvrages 
du po^te. Quel que soit le m6rite de cette appreciation, elle ne 
serait pas applicable a Danton. Sa virility avait 6ti compromise, 
non perdue, et il conserva toute son energie et toute sa hardiesse. 
Rien ne I'arretait : chaque jour il donnait de nouvelles preuves 
de t^m^rite. A peine fut-il r^tabli de ce malheureux accident, 
qu'entrain^ par sa passion pour la natation, il faillit se noyer et 
fut atteint d'une fi^vre maligne, k laquelle vint se joindre une 
petite v^role tr^s grave, accompagn^e du pourpre. Tout semblait 
ainsi se r^unir pour le defigurer. 

"Pour faire contracter k son enfant quelques habitudes de 
discipline, la m^re de Danton le remit d'abord a la surveillance 
d'une mattresse d'ecole ; celle-ci n'avait pas le temps ou la volont^ 
d'user avec lui d'indulgence. Danton trouva quelque diflKrence 
dans la comparaison de ce nouveau regime avec les tendresses de 
sa mfere et de son aieul : non moins s6v^re que la demoiselle 
Lambercier de J. -J. Rousseau, la maitresse d'ecole croyait ne 
pouvoir se passer de verges pour diriger les enfants, et Danton 



350 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

lui avait paru avoir les premiers droits h, ses corrections. Tous 
ees contemporains se souvenaient de I'avoir vu faire trop souvent 
I'ecole buissonni^re et employer les heures de classe k barboter 
dans I'Aube. II pr^f^rait la liberty de vivre k I'ennui de r^peter 
les caract^res de I'alphabet. II avait cependant d'heureuses apti- 
tudes et apprenait rapidement; mais toute habitude r^gl^e 6tait 
antipathique h sa nature. 

"A huit ans, il fut d^barrasse de la rigoureuse maitresse, et 
transvase, comme il le dit lui-meme, dans une institution superieure. 
Le chef de cette institution croyait savoir assez de latin pour en 
enseigner les Elements. Quand les premiers principes de la gram- 
maire ne sont pas montr^s avec une habile m^thode aux jeunes 
intelligences, elle leur offre peu d'attrait. 

" Danton en avait peu-etre un peu moins pour Lhomond que 
pour le jeu de cartes. A peine le devoir termini, en hate il courait 
avec quelques camarades dans un coin pour faire sa partie. Des 
billes ou des gateaux etaient le b^n6fice du gagnant. Souvent 
vainqueur, il partageait toujours avec le vaincu. Quand il se 
trouvait seul, il lisait ou allait se promener ans les bois ou dans 
les champs. 

" Pour modifier cette humeur un peu sauvage, les parents de 
Danton crurent devoir le mettre dans une maison religieuse. 

"Quoiqu'il ne fAt point destin6 k I'^tat eccMsiastique, on le 
plaja d'abord au petit s^minaire de Troyes; mais la monotonie de 
cette maison lui devint bient&t p^nible. Pendant tout le temps 
qu'il y resta, il observa la r^gle, mais il ne pouvait souffrir que 
sa r^cr^ation fut subitement interrompue par un coup de cloche, 
Cette cloche, disait-il, si je suis encore force de Ventendre longtemps, 
finira par sonner mon enterrement. 

"Un reproche mal fond^ et regu publiquement du sup^rieur 
d^cida Danton k soUiciter sa sortie du s^minaire. 

" Le fait suivant peut etre racontd comme trait de caract^re : 
La pension, dans cette maison, ^tait modique. Les el^ves n'avaient 
de vin qu'en le pay ant s^par^ment k la fin de chaque ann^e. Tous 
les dimanches on distribuait des cartes, qui Etaient une esp^ce de 
billet au porteur. En pr^sentant cette carte au distributeur, on 
recevait une mesure de vin appel^e roquille. Danton etait g^n^r- 
eux, et un de ses grands plaisirs alors 6tait de r^galer ses camarades 
en leur passant des cartes de roquilles, surtout a ceux qu'il savait 



APPENDIX V 351 

n'avoir pas la bourse bien garnie. Sa g^n^rosit6 alia si loin, que, 
lorsqu'on fit le compte g^n6ral et la proclamation publique de tous 
ceux qui avaient bu du vin, il se trouva etre celui qui avait fait 
une plus grande consommation de roquilles. La veille du depart 
pour les vacances, le superieur du petit s^minaire adressa ces 
paroles a Danton : Mon ami, vous pouvez vous jlatter d^etre le plus 
grand buveiir de la communaute. A ces mots, tous les rires 
d'^clater sur lui ; il ne repondit pas, mais il se promit bien de ne 
plus boire de roquilles au petit s^minaire. Malgre une veritable 
bont^, Danton 6tait peu endurant, et on I'avait surnomm^ Vanti- 
superieicr, et meme le republicain. 

"A peine revenu k Arcis-sur-Aube, il d^clara a sa mfere qu'il 
ne rentrerait plus au petit s^minaire : " II y a la, dit-il, des habi- 
tudes qui ne me vont pas, et que je ne pourrai jamais comprendre. 
L'ann^e suivante, on le mit dans une pension laique. Ses 6tudes 
n'y perdirent rien, car il eut depuis des succes qu'il n'avait pas 
obtenus auparavant. II fit ainsi sa seconde, et y remporta la 
presque totality des prix. . . . 

"E"ous arrivons au mois de juin 1775. On apprend que le 
sacre de Louis XVI. va s'accomplir h. Reims. Danton avait d^ja 
plus d'une fois entendu les imprecations dont toute la France 
couvrait la m^moire de Louis XV. A I'age de seize ans il en 
savait assez pour abhorrer I'emploi des lettres de cachet, qui 
etaient si prodigu6es sous ce r^gne scandaleux. Le professeur 
avait annonc^ qu'il donnerait I'^v^nement du sacre du nouveau 
monarque comme texte d'amplification : Pour bien se penetrer de 
son sujet, dit Danton d'un ton d^cid6j il faut se servir de ses yeux. 
Je suis curieux de voir comment se fait un roi. 

" Son projet n'est confix qu'k quelques fidMes camarades qui 
lui pr^tent de I'argent pour sa route. II part sans pr^venir son 
maitre; il traverse son pays d'Arcis sans voir ses parents, dans 
la crainte de les trouver opposes a son pMerinage. Apr6s avoir 
franchi vingt-huit lieues sans encombre, il arrive k E.eims, se 
glisse partout ; il suit attentivement toutes les ceremonies du sacre, 
et il entend le jeune monarque, la main sur I'Evangile, prononcer 
le serment de regner par les lois et pour le bonheur de la nation. 
Que des reflexions fait nattre un pareil spectacle dans un cerveau 
ardent, d^jk prompt k concevoir de rapprochements ! 

" A son retour de Eeims, les amis de Danton etaient impatients 



352 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

de I'entendre raconter tout ce qu'il avait vu. Get appareil ne 
I'avait pas emerveill6, la richesse des decors de la cathedrale ne 
I'avait pas s^duit. II raisonnait assez ddjk pour sentir que ce 
n'^tait gu<\re plus qu'une pompe vaine, encore dispendieuse pour 
la France dejk si ob^r^e. Le jeune voyageur s'^gayait en parlant 
de ce nombreux essaim d'oiseaux de toute espfece auxquels on avait 
donn6 la volde dans I'^glise : " Plaisante liherte, disait-il, que de 
voltiger entre quatre murs, sans avoir de quoi manger ni poser son 
nid/" II comparait aussi les oiseaux babillards aux courtisans 
qui entouraient d6ja le nouveau roi, par continuation de leur 
devouement pour le d^funt. A I'entendre debiter avec autant 
de simplicity que de malice ses reflexions sur le luxe, on peut 
entrevoir que I'dcolier moraliste, devenu grand, ne sera pas sans 
quelque exigence envers la royaute, et sans quelque sev^rit^ envers 
les agents qui vivent des abus. 

" Danton, revenu k Troyes, ^prouva des difficult^s pour rentrer 
k sa pension. Sa sortie, h I'insu du maltre, avait indispos^ celui- 
ci. Le voyageur, soumis et repentant, proteste qu'il n'a ete ct 
Reims que pour se mettre en mesure de faire en connaissance de 
cause son devoir d' amplification sur le sacre. II produit effective- 
ment un morceau des plus brillants, mais ou il se defend d'intro- 
duire les observations hardies ^chapp^es dans la familiarite de la 
conversation, qui ne peuvent se presenter dans une narration 
^crite, dont les convenances sont la premiere regie. Le maitre, 
satisfait et surpris du merite de I'oeuvre, en fait lecture k ses 
6l^ves. II dit qu'il aurait donne la premiere place cb I'auteur s'il 
n'avait fait Vecole huissonniere. Les camarades de Danton s'unis- 
sent avec enthousiasme k I'appr^ciation du maltre ; ils admirent 
comment I'enfant prodigue, leur ayant fait un r6cit aussi piquant, 
aussi jovial de son voyage, avait pu en meme temps mettre dans 
son style autant de reserve et de noblesse. C'est ainsi que Danton 
fait admettre ses excuses, et sa grace est devenue une espece de 
triomphe. II reprend sa classe, dont les travaux allaient bientfit 
se terminer. L'^poque des compositions pour les prix annuels 
approchait; se fiant a sa facility, Dantou ne semble pas se pre- 
parer au concours. Mais d6s que les sujets de composition sont 
donnas, il rassemble tons les efibrts de son intelligence et obtient 
toutes les couronnes. II d^ploie d'admirables moyens dans le 
discours frangais, la narration latine et la po^sie. Imagination, 



APPENDIX V 353 

jugement, exactitude, saillie dans la pensee, force, elegance, 
originality dans I'expression, rien ne lui manque, et le i8 aoiit 
1775 fut peut-etre le plus beau jour de sa vie. Le nom de 
Dantortr Gamut (qui ^tait celui de sa m^re pour le distinguer d'un 
homonyme son condisciple) fut r^pet6 au bruit des fanfares. Si 
le laureat fut heureux, ce fut surtout en apportant ses lauriers a 
sa mfere, objet de son culte et de son amour ; cette pi^t6 filiale, 
d^s lors le plus vif de ses sentiments, demeurera la meme dans 
son Qoeur pendant tout le cours de sa vie, quelles qu'en soient 
les violences ou les distractions; plus tard, il la montra mieux 
encore, et I'homme auquel il voua la haine la plus tenace fut 
un miserable soupgonne d'avoir manqu^ de respect k Madame 
Danton. 

"Lorsqu'un ^colier se distinguait au college, on songeait a la 
carri^re que lui ouvriraient ses talents. II faut en faire un pretrd 
ou un procureur. Le cur 6 de Barberey, pres Troyes, design ait 
dejk Danton pour qu'il lui succedat dans son presbyt^re ; mais le 
moment de s^jour que Danton avait fait au s^minaire ne lui avait 
pas inspir^ la vocation eccl^siastique. II avait besoin de liberty, 
il lui fallait les franches allures, I'independance. II demandait 
une profession lib^rale, il ddsirait etre avocat. . . . Demosthenes 
et Cic6ron, qu'il venait de commencer k connattre n'^taient-ils pas 
des avocats ? La famille r^unie ayant defer^ au voeu de Danton, 
il fut decide qu'il irait k Paris et qu'il travaillerait chez un pro- 
cureur pour y apprendre la procedure en meme temps qu'il ferait 
ses etudes de droit, pour se preparer au barreau. 

"Ici vient se placer une circonstance int^ressante qui fait 
honneur a Danton et qui fournit une nouvell6 preuve de sa 
tendresse pour ses parents. Madame veuve Danton, demeur^e 
seule avec sa nombreuse famillle, s'etait remari^e pour lui donner 
un soutien. EUe avait ^pous^ M. Eecordin, estimable negociant, 
dont la bonte est rest6e proverbiale dans le pays : bon et brave 
comme Recordin. Par suite de sa facility dans ses relations, les 
affaires de la maison Recordin se trouverent embarass^es. Danton, 
loin d'exiger les comptes qu'il avait droit de demander de la 
fortune qui lui revenait de son pere, fut le premier a ofifrir des 
secours a son beau-pere ; il mit a sa disposition tout ce qui lui 
appartenait; il alia jusqu'k engager la portion du bien de ses 
tantes qui devait lui echoir un jour, ne craignant pas d'ali^ner 

Z 



354 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

son present en son avenir. 11 faut metfre ses affaires en r^gle, 
disait-il, quand on fait un grand voyage. 

" Tels furent les pr^paratifs du depart. 

"Tons les t^moignages de ses camarades, parents et amis, 
d^posent de la delicatesse de Danton sous tons les rapports; k 
I'exception du pr^t de quelques ^cus qui lui furent offerts par 
ses camarades pour le voyage de Reims, il n'a jamais demande 
d'argent k qui que ce soit, dans les moments oti, soit comme 
ecolier, soit comme clerc de procureur, il a pu 6prouver de ces 
genes de jeune homme qui rendent hardi aux emprunts. 

"Danton arrive a Paris en 1780 dans la voiture du messager 
d'Arcis-sur-Aube, qui ^tait I'ami de sa famille, et qui voulut lui 
faire la conduite gratuitement. II se logea a I'auberge du Cheval 
noir, tenue rue Geoffroy-Lasnier par un nomm^ Layron, qui dtait 
I'hote le plus frdquent^ par les Champenois. Danton avait tres 
peu de fonds, et il dut se mettre imm^diatement au travail : il 
entra chez un procureur appel^ Yinot. Ce procureur commen§a par 
lui demander un module de son ecriture, qu'il ne trouva pas belle. 
Les procureurs de ce temps-la voulaient de ces ecritures promptes 
et faciles, propres a produire de larges grosses, de longues requetes. 
Le jeune Cbampenois d^clara franchement qu'il rHetait pas venu 
pour etre copiste. Ce ton d'assurance imposa au procureur Yinot. 
II dit : J'aime Vaplomh, il en faut dans notre etat. 

" Danton f ut admis comme clerc, avec la nourriture et le loge- 
ment. II 6tudia la procedure non sans quelque d^golit ; il fut 
charg4 comme on dit dans le metier, de faire le palais. C'est 
la premiere initiation des jeunes clercs aux affaires. Elle com- 
mence k les mettre en relation avec les choses et les personnes du 
monde judiciare, et leur donne les Elements de la pratique par de 
petits plaidoyers sommaires et des explications contradictoires qui 
leur ouvrent les idees et leur apprennent a se conduire dans le laby 
rinthe ou ils sont destines k vivre. 

" Danton remplissait sa fonction de clerc avec intelligence et 
exactitude; ses recreations les plus habituelles ^talent toujours 
I'escrime, la paume et la natation, sa passion favorite ! dont il 
usait fr^quemment; c'^tait le besoin meme de son temperament. 
II 6tait assez habile a cet exercice pour etre cite au premier rang ; 
il y trouva un encouragement digne de son Emulation. II sauva 
plusieurs fois de la mort des camarades qui auraient p6ri s'il n'^taifc 



APPENDIX V 355 

venu au secours de leur imprudence et de leur faiblesse. Quel- 
ques-uns d'entre eux ont racontd les tours de force veritables que 
Danton ex^cutait dans les courants les plus difficiles de la riviere. 
De I'endroit meme ou ils prenaient leurs 6bats, on voyait les tours 
de la Bastille, et plus d'une fois les baigneurs ont entendu Danton, 
dressant sa tete comme un triton, jeter une menace du cot^ de la 
prison d'Etat et s'ecrier de sa voix vibrante : Ge chateau fort 
susjpendu sur notre tete m'offusque et me gene. Quand le verrons- 
nous ahattu ? Pour moi, ce jour let, fy donnerais un fier coup de 
pioche 1 

"Les constitutions les plus robustes sont sou vent les plus 
expos^es, parce que cette exuberance de force donne plus de 
s^curite. Danton, k la suite d'une double partie de natation et 
d'escrime, fut encore attaient d'une grave maladie. Longtemps 
retenu au lit, alors que son corps ^tait r^duit ^ I'inaction, il ne 
pouvait se livrer a ses exercices babituels, mais son imagination 
ne restait point inactive. Avec son infatigable ardeur de lecture, 
il s'obstina k lire VEncyclopedie tout entiere, et il avait achev^ ce 
labeur si considerable avant que la convalescence flit terminee. 
II trouvait encore le temps de lire les grands publicistes dont les 
principes et la morale politique commengaient a devenir les guides 
du siecle. Montesquieu qu'il devait souvent citer, fut de sa part 
I'objet d'une etude tout particuli^re, et, apr^s avoir lu VEsprit des 
lots, il disait : Quel horizon nouveau s'ouvre devant moi! Je rial 
qu'un regret, c'est de retrouver dans Vecrivain qui vous porte si loin 
et si haut, le president d'un parlement. De Montesquieu, Danton 
passa bientot k Yoltaire, k J. -J. Rousseau, puis k Beccaria, qui 
apparaissait alors. Danton ne tarda pas a savoir par coeur I'admir- 
able petit ouvrage de cet auteur, le traits Des delits et des peines, 
q ai allait reformer la legislation criminelle du monde ; afin de se 
preparer des couleurs de style pour le jour oil il aurait a parler 
aux foules, afin d'apprendre, k revetir les questions sociales des 
belles images de la nature, Danton ^tudia particuli^rement VHis- 
toire naturelle de Bufifon : au moyen de sa puissante mdmoire il 
en retenait et recitait des pages entieres. Yoila d'amples pro- 
visions d'instruction qui pourront trouver un jour un utile emploi 
dans la carri^re de I'homme public ! Tout en d^daignant la littera- 
ture frivole et n'ayant jamais lu de romans que les chefs-d'oeuvre 
consacr^s qui sont des peintures de moeurs, Danton apprit en 



2S6 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

meme temps la langue italienne assez pour lire le Tasse, I'Arioste 
et meme le Dante. II faisait aussi des vers avec facility, quelques- 
uns meme adresses, en tout bien et tout honneur, k une personne 
qui n'^tait pas indigne de les lui inspirer, k la femme de son 
procureur. 

" Mais tous ces delassements litt^raires ^taient en dehors de la 
profession qu'il voulait exercer. lis ne lui firent point n^liger 
I'apprentissage de la procedure et du droit. 

"II lui restait maintenant a devenir de licenci^ avocat, et 
comme il avait gard6 un bon souvenir de la ville de Reims, il alia 
se faire recevoir avocat dans cette ville. Champenois de coeur, il 
etait heureux de contribuer de tous ses moyens k I'honneur de son 
pays natal. II avait toujours de bonnes saillies k son service, et 
ne manquait pas une occasion de citer des hommes distingues 
dans les lettres et les arts de diverses ^poques qui appartenaient 
k la province de Champagne. Parmi les contemporains, Danton 
pouvait du reste trouver plus d'un exemple A I'appui de son 
patriotique enthousiasme : c'est ainsi qu'il parlait souvent de 
quelques notabilit^s qu'il connaissait, tels que le savant Grosley, 
I'avocat Linguet. 

" De retour de Reims k Paris, Danton, apr^s avoir achev^ son 
stage, s'essaya au barreau de la capitale pendant quelque temps. 
Charg6 d'une affaire, entre autres, pour un berger contre le 
seigneur de son village, il eut I'occasion de produire, en cette 
circonstance, quelques-uns des sentiments qu'il devait plus tard 
developper davantage sur un grand th^^tre. II reclama avec 
autant de vigueur que d'adresse les principes de I'^galite devant 
la loi. II gagna sa cause devant la cour de parlement qui, comme 
on se le rappelle, n'^tait alors compos^e que de nobles et de privi- 
legies. Nous ne sommes encore qu'en 1 785. Le factum de Danton 
fut imprime : il ^tait concis, substantiel, ^nergique — nous n'avons 
pu en retrouver la trace. — Cette premiere lutte soutenue par 
Danton fit sensation au palais et valut au jeune avocat des 
t^moignages d'estime de Gerbier, Debonnifere, Hardouin et de 
toutes les sommites du barreau de cette ^poque. Linguet, qui se 
connaissait en style, et qui, nous I'avons vu, 6tait de Reims," lui 
adressa a ce sujet de vifs encouragements. 

" Mais les temoignages de ces hommes 6minents, qui assuraient 
k Danton un succ^s d'honneur, ne le menaient point k la fortune ; 



APPENDIX V 357 

il s'en ^loignait meme a mesure que son talent aurait dil I'en 
rapprocher davantage, car il recherchait la clientele du pauvre 
autant que d'autres recherchaient la clientele du riche. II pensait 
qu'en th^se g^n^rale le pauvre est le plus souvent I'opprim^, 
qu'ainsi il a le droit de priority h, la defense. D'aprfes ce principe 
de conduite, ceux qui ont dit que Danton n'avait point fait fortung 
au barreau, pouvaient ajouter qu'il ne I'y aurait jamais faite. . . . 

"S'ennuyant peut-§tre un peu, comme on a pu I'entrevoir, dans 
sa profession d'avocat, Danton ne demandait point de distraction 
h des plaisirs qui auraient pu prendre sur les ressources necessaires 
a son existence. Gagnant fort peu dans ses travaux de palais, il 
n'aurait pas voulu ajouter k la ggne de sa position en contractant 
des dettes; il ^tait fort rang^, toujours avec une petite reserve 
d'^conomies qui lui permettait de rendre des services sans en 
demander lui-meme. Apr^s son frugal repas chez un traiteur, 
dont la maison ^tait nomm^e V Hotel de la Modestie, il prenait une 
demi-tasse de eaf^ et jouait quelques parties de dominos. Ajoutez, 
de temps en temps, le spectacle d'une trag^die classique au 
Th^atre-Franjais, voil^ toute la d^pense et tous les amusements 
du jeune avocat. 

" Un caf6 oil se rendait le plus habituellement Danton s'appe- 
lait Cafe de VEcole, parce qu'il ^tait situ6 sur ce quai, presque au 
coin de la place qui a conserve ce nom. C'^tait un rendez-vous 
tr^s frequents par les hommes de loi qui se trouvaient rapproch^s 
du Chatelet et du Palais de Justice. La rigueur du costume et 
de la coiffure, espfece de signalement perp^tuel, avait cet avantage 
qu'on n'^tait pas tente de se commettre. 

" Les maitres des caf^s, alors peu nombreux dans Paris, ^taient 
eux-m^mes des bourgeois d'honnete allure. lis maintenaient le 
bon. ton de leur maison par leur civility. lis faisaient rarement 
fortune, a Fexception de deux ou trois qui ^talent de premier 
rang. Le Cafe de VEcole n'etait pas pr^cis^ment k ce niveau ; mais 
il ^tait I'un de ceux qui avaient la meilleure reputation. Ifous 
croyons voir encore le maitre de la maison avec sa petite perruque 
ronde, son habit gris et sa serviette sous le bras, II 6tait rempli 
de provenances pour ses clients, et il en 6tait traits avec une con- 
sideration cordiale. Une femme des plus recommandables et fille 
de la maison, aussi douce que gracieuse, tenait le comptoir. 
Parmi les habitues, qui paraissaient s'arreter avec un interSt 



358 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

particulier k ce comptoir, on put remarquer un jeune avocat qui, 
d'abord fort gai et jovial, parut quelque temps aprfes plus s^rieux. 
Ce jeune avocat ^tait Danton ; il avait cru d'abord ne causer que 
g6n6ralement et sans consequence avec les dames du comptoir ; 
son coeur s'y 6tait pris, et Danton 6tait amoureux. Mademoiselle 
Gabrielle Charpentier n'avait pas song6 h se d^fier des assiduit6s 
de Danton ; elle se trouva bient&t, k son insu, preoccup^e du 
meme sentiment. Sans etre dans le secret de cette inclination, le 
pere et la m^re Charpentier ne furent pas tr^s surpris quand la 
main de leur fille leur fut demand^e par le jeune avocat. La 
vivacity de son caract^re leur fit craindre un moment de consentir 
k cette union ; mais il avait su toucher le ccBur de Gabrielle. 
Lorsqu'on disait : Qu'il est laid ! elle r6p6tait, presque comme 
I'avait dit une femme au sujet de Lekain : Qu!il est beau ! Elle 
admirait son esprit, que I'on trouvait trop piquant ; son ^me, que 
Ton trouvait trop ardente ; sa voix, que I'on trouvait forte et 
terrible, et qu'elle trouvait douce. 

•' II fallait cependant prendre des renseignements sur ce pr^- 
tendant. M. Charpentier visita particuli^rement les procureurs 
chez qui Danton avait travaill^, et les avocats avec lesquels il 
avait ^t^ en rapport au barreau. II n'y eut qu'une voix en sa 
faveur. D'aprfes des renseignements aussi satisfaisants, les bons 
parents ne s'inform^rent point de sa fortune ; ils y tenaient peu, 
quoique en ayant eux-memes une assez modeste. Pourtant, ils 
donnaient en mariage k leur fille une somme de 40,000 francs, ce 
qui 6tait pour I'^poque une dot considerable. lis imposaient a 
leur gendre une seule condition, c'est qu'il exerjat un 6tat ; c'est 
qu'il fiit occupe. La profession d'avocat au parlement ^tait sans 
doute une profession honorable et libre, mais trop libre peut-etre, 
et qui ne commandait pas un travail assez assidu. Danton promit 
de remplir les vceux de son beau-p^re ; il s'exprima dans des 
termes si chaleureux, que le pfere et la mfere Charpentier se mirent 
k aimer Danton presque autant que leur fille. 

"Des amis de Danton lui conseill^rent d'acheter une charge 
d'avocat aux conseils. M. et Madame Charpentier offrirent g^n^- 
reusement la dot de leur fille ; mais ce n'^tait que 40,000 francs, 
et il en fallait 80,000 ! Des Champenois d^vou^s proposk'ent 
de completer ce qui manquait pour le payement de la charge. 

" lis s'en rapportaient tous k la delicatesse et a la probity de 



APPENDIX V 359 

Danton ; sa bonne conduite etait sa caution. Le mariage n'ayant 
plus de cause de retard, les bans publics, le consentement de sa 
m^re arriv^ d'Arcis-sur-Aube, Georges-Jacques Danton et Gabrielle 
Charpentier furent unis, et le meme jour il entra, comme il le 
disait gaiement, en puissance defemme et en charge d'officier minis- 
Uriel ; le mtme jour, mari et avocat aux conseils. 

"Les avocats aux conseils r^unissaient les doubles fonctions 
d'avocats et de procureurs; ayant peu de procedure a faire, ils 
avaient I'avantage de rester maitres de leurs affaires et de ne pas 
subir, comme les avocats des autres cours, la loi d'un procureur 
pr^occup^ du desir d'attirer k lui tous le b^n^fices. Les fonctions 
des avocats aux conseils avaient aussi quelque chose d'6minem- 
ment propre k Clever Fame des jeunes gens ; leur mission consistait 
souvent a redresser les torts du parlement et des cours sup^rieures. 
lis communiquaient journellement avec les maitres des requetes, 
avec les conseillers d'Etat, avec les hommes du plus haut rang, qui 
6taient obliges de recourir k leur minist6re pour lutter contre les 
usurpations dont ils avaient k se plaindre. 

" Les avocats aux conseils avaient ainsi I'occasion, en discutant 
avec les ministres eux-memes, soit pour les attaquer, soit pour les 
d^fendre, d'apprendre k connaitre les rapports des autoritf^s entre 
elles, la vraie distinction des pouvoirs, I'organisation civile dans 
toute son ^tendue, I'ordre social dans son ensemble : c'^tait une 
excellente 6cole pour creer des 6conomistes, des politiques, des 
l^gislateurs. 

" En exposant le role et la mission des avocats aux conseils, 
nous aurions peut-etre d1i expliquer que tels etaient au moins la 
pens^e et le droit de I'institution. Faut-il constater maintenant 
ce qu'^tait en fait I'institution? Sur le nombre de soixante 
membres composant I'honorable confr^rie, on voyait plusieurs 
hommes distingu^s qui sentaient la dignity de leurs fonctions, 
traitaient leurs clients avec g6n^rosit^ et delicat^sse, les affaires avec 
science, application et courage. Mais tous, il faut bien le dire, 
n' avaient pas un sentiment aussi 6lev6 de leurs devoirs, et il en etait 
quelques-uns dont I'^mulation consistait a faire beaucoup de grosses. 

" Au moment oil Danton fut reju avocat aux conseils, c'^tait 
en 1787; il avait vingt-huit ans, sa femme en avait vingt-cinq. 
Dans ce moment, I'Ordre etait divise en trois partis plus ou moins 
actifs. 



360 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

" Les anciens voulaient creer un syndicat, k la tete duquel ils 
auraient ^t^ tout naturellement places. 

" Les jeunes arrivants appartenaient aux id^es nouvelles, et ne 
voulaient etre ni conduits ni econduits. 

" XJn troisi^me parti se composait des hommes mod^r^s et 
pacifiques qui, aimant le repos avant tout, et, comme on a dit 
depuis, la paix partout et toujours, ne voulaient se meler k aucune 
action et preferaient laisser faire le mal k leur detriment plutot 
que de se mouvoir en aucun sens et se laisser d^ranger meme par 
un progr^s qui leur eiit ^t6 utile, mais qui aurait pu les desheurer. 

" On a deja pressenti k quel parti Danton avait dil se rallier. 
II ne m^connaissait pas la discipline qui doit pr6sider a la bonne 
organisation d'une compagnie judiciaire ; mais il croyait que la 
force et la puissance r^elles des compagnies sont dans leur ind^- 
pendance, comme le talent m^me des membres de ces corporations 
ne peut se passer de la dignity du caractfere. 

" L'homme qui, en entrant dans una compagnie, dessine ses 
opinions avec une ^nergique rudesse, peut s'attendre k rencontrer 
bien des luttes et bien des hostilit(^s. 

*' Voulant juger la valeur du nouvel arrivant, les avocats, sous 
pr^texte de bienvenue, et sans I'avoir averti a I'avance, lui firent 
subir une ^preuve en latin. On lui imposa pour sujet I'expose de 
la situation morale et politique du pays dans ses rapports avec la 
justice. C'^tait, comme Danton I'a dit depuis, lui proposer de 
marcher sur des rasoirs. . . . II ne recula point. Saisissant 
meme comme une bonne fortune la difficult^ inattendue dans 
laquelle on croyait I'enlacer, il s'en tira avec eclat, et laissa ses 
auditeurs dans I'^tonnement de sa presence d'esprit et de la 
decision de son caractfere. II ne craignit point d'aborder la 
politique qui commengait k p^n^trer en toute affaire, et qui ^tait 
peut-etre ici une cause secrete du pifege qui lui ^tait tendu. On 
esp^rait surprendre en dMaut un jeune avocat qui levait la tete et 
annon5ait des principes d'independance. Danton, en homme de 
talent habile k triompher des plus grandes difficult^s, osa parler 
des cboses les plus actuelles ; il dit que, comme citoyen ami de 
son pays, autant que comme membre d'une corporation consacr^e 
k la defense des int^rets priv^s et publics de la soci^te, il d^sirait 
que le gouvernement senttt assez la gravity de la situation pour y 
porter rem^e par des moyens simples, naturels et tir^s de son 



APPENDIX V 361 

autorite • qu'en presence des besoins imp^rieux du pays, il fallait 
se resigner k se sacrifier ; que la noblesse et le clerge, qui etaient 
en possession des richesses de la France, devaient donner I'exemple ; 
que, quant a lui, il ne pouvait voir dans la lutte du parlement, qui 
^clatait alors, que I'int^ret de quelques particuliers puissants qui 
combattaient les ministres, mais sans rien stipuler au profit du 
peuple. II d^clarait qu'k ses yeux I'horizon apparaissait sinistra, 
et qu'il sentait venir une revolution terrible. Si seulement on 
pouvait la reculer de trente anndes, elle se ferait amiablement par 
la force des choses et le progres des lumiferes. II rep^ta dans ce 
discours, qui ressemblait au cri proph^tique de Cassandre : Malheur 
d ceux qui provoquent les revolutions, malheur a ceux qui les font ! 

'• Plusieurs fois les vieux avocats qui avaient tendu ce pifege a 
Danton voulurent interrompre son improvisation. lis avaient cru 
entendre des mots qui les eflfrayaient, tels que motus populorum, 
ira gentium, solus populi suprema lex. . . . Les jeunes gens qui, 
r^cemment sortis des colleges, avaient le droit de comprendre le 
latin mieux que les anciens, qui I'avaient oubli6 ou ne I'avaient 
jamais su, r^pondaient k leurs vieux confreres qu'ils avaient mal 
entendu, que le recipiendaire ^tait rest6 dans une mesure parfaite, 
irr^prochable. 

" Esperant constater plus f acilement dans le texte d'une reac- 
tion ^crite les pens^es imprudentes qu'ils avaient cru saisir en 
^coutant ses paroles, les anciens demanderent que Danton d6posat 
son discours de reception sur la table de la chambre du conseil. 
Danton r^pondit qu'il n'avait rien ecrit. II avait d^j^ pour syst^me 
d'^crire le moins possible. Ainsi qu'il I'a dit depuis, on n'^crit 
point en revolution. II ajouta d'ailleurs que si I'on desirait porter 
un jugement sur les paroles qu'il avait prononc^es, il ne pr^tendait 
pas s'y opposer. II etait assez certain de sa pens^e et de sa 
m^moire pour r^p^ter avec fidelity toute son improvisation. . . . 
Le remade eut 6t6 pire que le mal. L'ar^opage trouva que c'^tait 
dejk, bien assez de ce qu'on avait entendu, et la majority s'opposa 
avec vivacite k la r^cidive. 

" Le cabinet achet^ par Danton ^tait loin, au moment oA il en 
devint titulaire, de posseder une clientele nombreuse. II n'en fut 
pas moins toujours d'un grand desint^ressement vis-k-vis de ses 
clients. 

" II se montrait peu exigeant dans la question des honoraires, 



362 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

m^me lorsqu'il avait gagn^ sa cause. Lorsque son client venait 
s'acquitter en vers lui, il lui arrivait sou vent de dire : c'esif trop, et 
de rendre ce qu'il appelait le trop. Dans certaines aflfaires per- 
dues, il refusait toute remuneration. ' Je n'ai point de d^bourses, 
disait-il, puisque je n'ai point fait d'ecritures, et que j'ai laiss^ k 
la r^gie son papier timbr^.' II lui arrivait, bien qu'il ne flit pas 
riche, de donner lui-meme des secours d'argent k des clients 
malheureux. 

" Une pareille conduite ne mene pas rapidement h. la fortune, 
Cependant le cabinet de Danton s'ani61iora en tr^s peu de temps. 
En dirigeant dignement ses affaires, il gagnait de vingt k yingt- 
cinq mille francs par an ; son sort de p^re de famille 6tait assur6. 

" Dans ce temps ou la France etait encore divis^e en provinces, 
les classes inf^rieures pouvaient se r^clamer des grands seigneurs 
de leur pays, et ceux-ci aimaient souvent par vanity autant que 
par humanity h, prot^ger leurs vassaux. La maison de Brienne 
^tait de Champagne, pr^s Arcis-sur-Aube. Danton ^tait connu du 
comte de Brienne, ancien ministre de la guerre, et de I'arcliev^que 
de Sens, alors premier ministre. II comptait parmi ses clients M. 
de Barentin. II avait des conferences avec lui pour ses affaires 
particuli^res, et plusieurs fois, apr^s les avoir traitees, M. de 
Barentin s'entretenait avec son avocat des affaires publiques. La 
manifere sup^rieure dont Danton voyait les cboses avait frapp6 
M. de Barentin et lui avait laiss6 une vive impression de sa 
capacity 

" Devenu garde des sceaux, M. de Barentin se souvint aussitot 
de son avocat et lui fit demander s'il voulait etre secretaire de la 
chancellerie ? Danton, dans un long entretien qu'il eut avec ce 
ministre, lui exposa avec details un plan qu'il croyait pouvoir 
eloigner les dechirements que I'opposition des parlements allait 
enfanter. Quelques-uns de ces parlements venaient d'etre exiles : 
Danton pensait que leur rappel n'etait pas une chose de la plus 
grande urgence. II fallait avant tout les enlacer dans la partici- 
pation aux ref ormes ; lis en etaient autant les adversaires que la 
noblesse et le clerge, dont ils faisaient en quelque sorte partie et 
dont ils avaient les privileges. Tous les priviiegies enfin, quels 
que fussent leurs costumes, qu'ils eussent un manteau de noblesse, 
une soutane de pretre ou une robe de palais, tous, selon I'opinion 
de Danton, devaient contribuer aux charges qui ne pesaient que 



APPENDIX V 363 

sur le tiers Etat, c'est-k-dire sur rimmense majority ; la nation 
attendait Fall^gement du fardeau intolerable qu'elle ne pouvait 
plus supporter, la resignation ^tait ^puisee. . . . 

"Si ces id^es ^taient accept^es, le roi, ^tant k leur t§te, se 
trouverait conqu^rir dans I'int^rSt de tous una puissance sup^rieure 
a tous les int^rSts particuliers. II pourrait r^aliser les demandes 
de la raison et donner, par un progr^s r^el, touts satisfaction aux 
lumi^res du siecle et k la pbilosophie, interprets des vrais besoins 
de rhumanite. 

*' En r^sum^, le plan con9u par Danton tendait ^ fairs accom- 
plir par le roi uns reforms progressive qui, laissant en place les 
pouvoirs etablis, les rendit, a leur insu on malgr^ eux, les instru- 
ments de cette ^quit^ pratique qui aurait fortifi^ k la fois tous les 
organes du m^canisme social. M. de Barentin parla du projet de 
Danton k I'archeyeque de Sens. On parut I'approuver. Dans 
I'intervalle, la cour r^pudia ce syst^me trop net et trop d^cisif 
pour ses allures. Le parlement fut rappel^. Brienne croyait en 
avoir gagnd les principaux msmbres. 

"Mais trois mois apr^s — novembre 1787 — lorsque le roi fut 
oblig^ de venir k Paris tenir un lit de justice k ce meme parlement 
pour obtenir I'enregistrement d'un edit portant creation de divers 
emprunts jusqu'k concurrence de 450 millions, Louis XVI rencon- 
tra la plus violente opposition dans cetts cour qu'on croyait r^duits. 
II voulut vaincre I'opposition sn exilant les plus recalcitrants, les 
conseillers Fr^teau, Sabatier, de Cabre et le due d'Orl^ans. . . . 
Au mois de mai suivant, 1788, le meme parlement rendit un arrit 
qui r^clama avec vehemence ' les lois fondamentales de I'Etat ; le 
droit de la nation d'accorder des subsides, le droit des cours du 
royaume de verifier les Idits, ds verifier dans cliaque province les 
volont^s du roi, et ds n'en accorder I'enregistrement qu'autant 
qu'elles seraient conformes aux lois constitutives de la province, 
ainsi qu'aux fondamsntales de I'Etat ; I'immovabilit^ et I'ind^- 
pendance des magistrats, le droit pour chaque citoyen de n'etre 
jamais traduit en aucune manifere devant d'autres juges que ses 
juges naturels d^signes par la loi ; le droit, sans lequel tous les 
autres sont inutiles, de n'etre arrete, par quelque ordre que ce soit, 
que pour etre remis sans d^lai entre les mains des juges comp^- 
tents ; protestant la cour du parlement contrs toute atteinte qui 
serait portee aux principes exprimes.' 



364 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

"M. de Barentin proposa de nouveau k Danton d'etre secre- 
taire du sceau. Celui-ci remercia en disant que I'^tat de la 
question politique 6tait change. 'Nous n'en sommes plus aux 
r^formes modestes ; ceux qui les ont refus^es ont refus6 leur 
propre salut ; nous sommes, dit-il plus nettement que jamais, h 
la veille d'une revolution. Eh quoi ! ne voyez-vous pas venii 
I'avalanche 1 . . . 

A. R. C. DB Saint-Albin." 



VI 

EXTRACTS FROM DOCUMENTS 

Showing the Price Paid for Danton's Place at the Conseils du 
Roi, the Sources from which he Derived the Money for 
ITS Payment, and the Compensation Paid on its Suppression 
IN 1791. 

The three documents from which I quote below are of 
the utmost importance to a special study of Danton, be- 
cause they give us most of our evidence as to the value of 
his post at the Conseils du Roi, and permit us to under- 
stand his financial position during the first years of the 
Revolution. 

They are three in number : — 

(a) The deed of sale by which Danton acquired the 
post from Me. Huet de Paisy. This deed was discovered 
by Dr. Robinet (from whose " Vie Priv^e de Danton " I 
take all the documents quoted) in the offices of a Parisian 
solicitor, Me. Faiseau-Jaranne of the Rue Vivienne. This 
gentleman was the direct successor in his business of the 
M. Dosfant who drew up the deed seventy years before. 

I have quoted only the essential portions of this exceed- 
ingly interesting piece of evidence. They give us the date 
of the transaction (March 29, 1787), the price paid, 78,000 
livres, or rather (seeing that Danton acquired the right to 
collect a debt of 1 1,000) 67,000 livres net (say ^2600) ; the 
fact that some ^2000 of this was paid down out of a 
loan raised for him by his relations in Champagne and his 
future father-in-law, while some £160 he paid out of his 
savings, and the rest remained owing. The receipt of 

1789, which I have attached at the end of the extract, 

36s 



266 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

shows us that by that time the balance had been paid 
over to Me. Huet de Paisy, including interest at 5 per 
cent. Incidentally there is mention of Danton moving 
to the Rue de la Tissanderie, whence we shall find him 
drawing up his marriage-contract. 

(6) The marriage-contract between Danton and Antoi- 
nette Charpentier, contains all the customary provisions 
of a French marriage-contract, and is witnessed by the 
usual host of friends, such as we find witnessing Des- 
moulins' contract, three or four years later. It tells us, 
among other things, the position of his stepfather Re- 
cordain and the well-to-do connections of the Charpen- 
tiers; but the point of principal interest is the dowry 
— 20,000 livres, that is, some ;^8oo — of which the greater 
part (;^6oo) went to pay his debt on the place he held 
as Avocat es Conseils, and the fact that he had remaining 
a patrimony of some ;^500. 

(c) The acknowledgment of the sum due as compensa- 
tion to Danton when the hereditary and purchasable ofiice 
which he had bought was put an end to. All students of 
the period know the vast pother that has been raised on 
this point, the rumour that Danton was overpaid as a 
kind of bribe from the court, &c. &c. All the direct 
evidence we have of the transaction is in these few lines. 
They are just like all the other forms of reimbursement, 
and are perfectly straightforward. 

The amount is somewhat less than we should give in 
England under similar circumstances, for (i) the State 
does not allow for the entrance-fees (10,000 livres), which 
Danton had had to pay, and (2) it taxes him 12 per 
cent, for the probable future taxation which would have 
fallen by death, transference, &c., on the estate. Finally, 
he gets not quite 70,000 hvres for a place which cost him 
first and last 78,000. 

To recapitulate : the general conclusions which these 
documents permit us to draw with regard to Danton's 
financial position are as follows : — The price of the practice 



APPENDIX VI 367 

he bought was 68,000 livres ; of this, 56,000 was paid down, 
a sum obtained by borrowing 36,000 from Mdlle. Duhattoir 
(a mortgagee discovered by the family solicitor, Millot), and 
15,000 from his future father-in-law, Charpentier, the re- 
maining 5000 being paid out of his own pocket. 

He thus remains in debt to Me. Huet de Paisy, the 
vendor, in a sum of 1 2,000 livres at 5 per cent, interest. 

To this must be added a sum of 10,000 livres entrance- 
fee, which he presumably pays by recovering a debt of 
somewhat larger amount (11,000) which he had bought 
along with the practice. 

When he marries, his wife's dowry cancels his debt to 
Charpentier and leaves him 5000 livres over, he possessing 
at that time in land and houses at Arcy some 12,000 — in 
all 17,000 livres or their value are in hand in the summer 
of 1787, and his total liabilities at the same date are the 
36,000 to Mdlle. Duhattoir and the 1 2,000 to Me. de Paisy. 
He starts his practice, therefore, with 31,000 livres, or about 
;^I200 of net liability. The practice was lucrative; we 
know that he is immediately concerned with three im- 
portant fchancery cases ; he becomes the lawyer of two of 
the wealthiest men in the kingdom; he lives modestly. 
We know that he pays the 12,000 with interest in 
December 1789, and though we do not possess the receipt 
for Mdlle. Duhattoir's repayment, it is eminently probable 
that, under such conditions, he could easily have met a 
debt of less than ;^8oo out of four years' successful practice 
in a close corporation, which of necessity dealt with the 
most lucrative cases in the kingdom. I think, therefore, one 
may regard the reimbursement which he received in 1791 
as presumably free from debt, and see him in no financial 
difficulty at any period of the Revolution. This opinion 
has the advantage of depending upon the support of all 
those who have lately investigated the same documents — 
MM. Aulard, Robinet, earlier Bougeart (but he is a special 
pleader), and finally Mr. Morse Stephens in England. 



368 THE LIFE OF DANTON 



(<z) From the Deed of Sale between Huet de Paisy and 
Danton, 29/^ March 1787. 

" Par devant les conseillers du Roi, notaires, &c. . . . 

"... Me. Charles-Nicholas Huet. de Paisy, ^cuyer, ancien 
avocat au Parlement et es conseils du Eoi, demeurant a Paris, 
Rue de la Tissanderie, paroisse de St. Jean en Greve ... a 
vendu ... a Me. Jacques-Georges Danton, avocat au Parlement, 
demeurant a Paris, Rue des Mauvaises Paroles, paroisse St. Ger- 
main I'Auxerrois . . . I'dtat et office h^reditaire d'avocat es con- 
seils du Roi, faisant un des 70 cr6es par ^dit du mois de septembre 

1738. . . . 

" Le dit Me. Huet de Paisy vend en outre en dit Me. Danton la 
pratique et clientele attach6es au sous dit office, et consistant en 
dossiers, liasses, &c. . . . 

"Cette vente est faite . . . par ledit Me. Danton qui s'y 
oblige d'entrer au lieu . . . dudit Me. Huet de Paisy. . . . Moy- 
ennannant la somme de 78,000 livres . . . dont 68,000 sont le 
prix de la pratique et 10,000 les charges accoutum^^s. . . . 

" Ledit Me. Huet de Paisy reconnait avoir re^u sur les 68,000 
livres (prix de la pratique) la somme de 56,000 livres dont autant 
quittances. Quant au 12,000 livres de surplus Me. Danton pro- 
met et s'oblige de les payer dans quatres annees du jour de sa 
reception audit office avec I'int^ret sur le pied du dernier vingt 
... (5 per cent.). 

"Declare en outre une . . . somme de 11,000 livres lui ^tre 
l^gitimement due par . . . {Then folloio the details of this debt to 
the office. Danton consents to pay the 68,000 oil condition that he 
may collect this debt from the client of the office, and specially 
mentions the fact that, if he is not given full poioers to collect, the 
price shall be not 68,000, hut only 57,000 liwes), . . . 

"A ces presentes est intervenu Me. Frangois- Jacques Millot, 
procureur au Parlement, demeurant a Paris, rue Percee, paroisse 
St. S6verin. Fond6 de la procuration sp6ciale pour ce qui suit du, 
Sieur Frangois Lenoir, maitre de poste, et dame Marie-Genevi^ve 
Camus, son Spouse, de dame Elisabeth Camus, veuve du Sieur 
Nicolas Jeannet et de demoiselle Anne Camus, fille majeure, 
demeurant tous k Arcy-sur-Aube, pass^e en brevet devant Morey 



APPENDIX VI 369 

notaire k Troyes, en presence de temoins, le deux d^cembre 
dernier, I'original de laquelle dtiment controle legalise a 6t6 certi- 
fi6 veritable et depos6 pour minute a Me. Dosfant, I'un des notaires 
soussign6s, par acte du vingt-huit du present mois. Lequel a, par 
ces pr^senfces, rendu et constitue lesdits Sieur et dame Lenoir, dame 
veuve Jeannet et demoiselle Camus, cautions et repondants solid- 
aires dudit Me. Danton envers ledit Me. Huet de Paisy, ce faisant 
les oblige soHdairement avec lui, s^par^ment les uns avec les 
autres au payement desdites douze mille livres qui restent dues 
sur ladite pratique, int^rets d'icelle, et au payement des dix mille 
livres, prix du corps dudit office aux ^poques ci-dessus fixees, h. 
quel ledit Me. Millot, audit nom, affecte, oblige et hypoth^que 
sous ladite solidarity, g^neralement tous les biens, meubles et 
immeubles, presents et a venir de ses constituants. 

"Ledit M. Danton declare que dans, les cinquante-six mille 
livres par lui ci-dessus payees, il y a trente-six mille livres qui 
proviennent des denier s qu'il a empruntes a demoiselle Frangoise- 
Julie Duhauttoir, demoiselle majeure, et quinze mille livres qu'il 
a emprunt^es du Sieur Frangois-Jdrome Charpentier, controleur 
des fermes, sous le cautionnement desdits Sieur et dame Lenoir, 
dame veuve Jeannet et demoiselle Camus. . • • ( What follows is 
the receipt in full, signed by Huet de Paisy in December 1789.) 

"Et le trois d^cembre mil sept cent quatre-vingt-neuf, est 
comparu devant les notaires k Paris, soussign^s, ledit Me. Huet de 
Paisy, nomm6 et qualifi6 en I'acte ci-devant, demeurant a Paris, 
rue des Couronnes, pr^s de Belleville, — Lequel a reconnu avoir 
regu dudit Me. Danton aussi ci-devant nomm^, qualifi^ et domi- 
cilii, k ce present, la somme de treize mille cinq cent livres com- 
pos^e, 1° des douze mille livres qui, sur le prix du traitd ci-devant, 
avaient 6t6 stipulees payables en quatre annees du jour de la re- 
ception dudit Me. Danton et sur lesquelles ce dernier devait 
exercer I'effet de la garantie contractde par ledit Me. de Paisy, 
par le traits ci-devant, relativement k I'affaire du Sieur Papillon 
de la Grange, de I'effet de laquelle garantie, quoique cette affaire 
ne soit pas encore termin^e, ledit Me. Danton d^charge ledit Me. 
de Paisy ; 2° et de quinze cents livres pours les int^rets de ladite 
somme de douze mille livres ^chus jusqu'au premier octobre 
dernier qu'ils ont cess6 de courir, de convention entre les parties ; 
de laquelle somme de treize mille cinq cents livres et de toutes 

2 A 



370 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

choses au sujet dudit traits, ledit Me. Huefc de Paisy quitte et 
d6charge Me. Danton ; — Dont acte fait et passe k Paris, en I'^tude, 
lesdits jour et an et ont sign6. 



(3) From the Marriage-Contract of Danton and Mdlle. 
Charpentier, gth June 1787. 

" Par devant les conseillers du Koi, &c. . . . 

" Me. Georges-Jacques Danton, avocat ^s conseils du Roi, de- 
meurant k Paris, rue de la Tissanderie, paroisse de Jean en Greve, 
fils du defunt Sieur Jacques Danton, bourgeois d'Arcis-sur-Aube, et 
dame Jeanne-Madeleine Camus, sa veuve actuellement Spouse du 
Sieur Jean Eeordain n6gociant audit Arcis-sur-Aube, de present a 
Paris, log^e chez ledit sieur, son fils, k ce present, stipulant le dit 
Me. Danton d'une part. 

"Et Sieur Fiangois- Jerome Charpentier, controleur desFermes, 
et dame Angelique-Octavie Soldini, son Spouse . . . demeurant h, 
Paris, quai de I'Ecole, paroisse de St. Germain TAuxerrois, stipu- 
lant pour . . . demoiselle Antoinette-Gabrielle Charpentier leur 
fiUe majeure . . . d'autre part. 

"... Ont arr^t^ les conventions civiles dudit mariage . • . 
k savoir ... 

{Then follow the names of the witnesses to the contract; their 
only importance is the idea they give us of the social position of the 
two bourgeois families concerned. They include Fapillon, a surgeon/ 
Dupont, a lawyer of the Chatelet; Duprat and Gousseau, barristers/ 
Wislet, a hanker ; Mme. Tavaval, widow of a painter to the Court, 
and so forth.) . . . 

"... Les biens dudit futur ^poux consistent : — 

"(1°) Dans I'office d'avocat aux conseils . . . ach^t6 k Me. 
Huet de Paisy . . . le 2 9 mars dernier . . . moyennant la somme 
de 68,000 livrea qu'il doit en entier soit audit Me. Huet de 
Paisy, soit aux personnes qui lui ont pr^te les sommes qu'il a 
payees comptant. 

" (2°) Dans de terres, maisons et heritages situ^ audit Arcis- 
surAube et aux environs de valeur de la somme de 12,000 
livres. . . . 

"Les pfere et mfere de ladite demoiselle lui donnent en dot 
• , . une somme de 18,000 livres . . . pour s'acquitter de cette 



APPENDIX VI 371 

somme ils . . . d^chargent ledit Me. Danton de celle de 15,000 
livres qu'ils lui ont pret^e, et qui a iU employee par lui an paye- 
ment de partie du prix . . . attach^e k I'office dudit Me. Huet de 
Paisy. . . . 

" lis ont presentement pay^ audit Me. Danton les 3000 livres 
completant les dix huit milles livres. 

" Enfin ladite demoiselle future Spouse apporte ... la somme 
de 2000 livres provenant de ses gains et ^pargnes." 

(The remainder of the document is a statement of the " com- 
munity property " in marriage and the settlements made in case of 
decease, the whole regulated by the " custom of Paris." They have 
no interest for this book.) 

(f) From the Note Liquidating Danton's Place at the Con- 

SEILS DU Roi AND HIS ReCEIPT FOR THE REIMBURSEMENT, St/j 

and nth of October 1791. Held by de Montmorin in his 
Office. 

"Nous, Louis-C^sar-Alexandre-Dufresne Saint-L^on, commis- 
saire du Eoi, directeur g^n^ral de la liquidation. 

"Attendu la remise h, nous faite des titres originelas . . . 
concernant I'office d'avocat fes conseils du Eoi dont ^tait titulair^ 
, . . le Sieur Georges-Jacques Danton. 

" Ledit office liquid^ . . . par d^cret de I'AssemW^e Nation- 
ale .. . sanctionn^ par le Eoi le deux octobre, k la somme de 
69,031 livres 4 sols. . . . Avons delivr^ au Sieur Danton ... la 
pr^sente reconnaissance definitive de la dite somme de 69,031 
livres 4 sols, qui sera pay^e k la caisse de I'extraordinaire. 

" M. Georges- Jacques Danton, avocat hs conseils, en presence 
des soussign^s ... a reconnu ... la liquidation . . . de I'office 
d'avocat ^s conseils du Eoi dont ^t^ titulair^ . . . ledit Georges- 
Jacques Danton . . . savoir. 

"(1°) 78,000 livres . . . principale moyennant laquelle il a 
acquis I'office le 29 Mars 1787. 

" (2*) 240 livres pour le remboursement du droit de mutation. 

"(3**) 416 livres 4 sols pour celui du Marc d'or. 

*'(4**) 125 livres pour celui des frais de Sceau. 

Deduction faite de 9750 pour le huiti^me du prix retenu. , . • 



372 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Au moyen du paisement effectif qui sera fait audit Sieur Danton de 
. . .69,031 livres 4 sols . . , quitte et d^charge I'^tat, M. 
Dufresne de Saint-L^on et tous autr^s de ladite somme de 69,031 
livres 4 sols . . . &c." {The remainder of the document is the 
mention of the original deed of sale having been shown to the 
liquidator, and the correction of certain clerical errors in a former 
document.) 



VII 

EXTRACTS FROM DOCUMENTS 

Showing the Situation of Danton's Apartment in the Cour 
DE Commerce, its Furniture and Value, &c. 

The extracts given below are of a purely personal in- 
terest, and do not add anything material to our knowledge 
of the Kevolution. On the other hand, they are of value 
to those who are chiefly concerned with Danton's person- 
ality, and with the details of his daily life. They show 
what kind of establishment he kept, with its simple furni- 
ture, its two servants, its reserve of money, &c., and enable 
us to make an accurate picture of the flat iu which he 
lived, and of its position. It is from them that I have 
drawn the material for my description of the rooms in 
Appendix II, on p. 329. Incidentally, they tell us the 
profession of M. Chai'pentier's brother (a notary), give us a 
view of the religious burial practised in the spring of 1793, 
show us, as do many of his phrases elsewhere, the entire 
absence of anti-clericalism in Danton's family as in his 
own mind, the number of the house, the name of its pro- 
prietor, Danton's wardrobe, his wine, the horse and carriage 
which he bought for his hurried return from Belgium, and 
many other petty details which are of such interest in the 
study of an historical character. 

Like most of the documents quoted ui this Appendix, 
they are due to the industry and research of Danton's 
biographer, Dr. Kobinet, and will be found in his Memoir 
on Danton's private life. They are three in number : — 

{a) The various declarations of Thuiller, the justice of 

the peace for the Section du Theatre Fran9ais. He put 

tn 



374 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

seals upon the doors and furniture (as is tlie Frencli 
custom) upon the death of Danton's first wife. This death 
occurred on February ii, 1793, while Danton was away 
on mission in Belgium, and the visit of the justice of the 
peace is made on the following day, the 12th. Danton 
returns at once, and the seals are removed on various 
occasions, from the 24th of March to the 5 th of April, in 
the presence of Danton himself, or of his father-in-law, 
Charpentier. 

(6) The inventory which accompanied the sealing and 
unsealing of the apartments. 

(c) The raising of the seals which were put upon the 
house after Danton's execution. Interesting chiefly for the 
astonishing writing and spelling of the new functionaries. 

All the three were obtained by Dr. Robinet from the 
lawyers who have succeeded to, or inherited from, the 
original " Etudes " where the documents were deposited. 

" Cejourd'hui douze f^vrier mil sept cent quatre-vingt-treize, 
Tan deuxi^me de la Republique frangaise, dix heures du matin, 
nous, Claude-Louis Thuiller, juge de paix de la section du Th^atre- 
Frangais, dite de Marseille, k Paris, sur ce que nous avons appris 
que la citoyenne Antoinette-Gabrielle Charpentier, Spouse du cito- 
yen Georges- Jacques Danton, depute a la Convention Nationale, 
^tait d6c6d^e le jour d'hier en son appartement, rue des Cordeliers, 
cour du Commerce, dans I'^tendue de notre section, et attendu 
que ledit citoyen Danton est absent par commission nationals, 
nous sommes transports avec le citoyen Antoine-Marie Berthout, 
notre secrStaire-greffier ordinaire, en une maison sise k Paris, rue 
des Cordeliers, cour du Commerce, et parvenus k I'entrSe de I'esca- 
lier qui conduit k I'appartement dudit citoyen Danton, nous avons 
trouv^ des pretres de la paroisse de Saint-AndrS-des-Arts et le 
cortege qui accompagnait I'enl^vement du corps de la d. Charpen- 
tier, Spouse dudit citoyen Danton, et Stant montSs au premier 
^tage au-dessus de I'entresol et entres dans I'appartement dudit 
citoyen, dans un salon ayant vue sur la rue des Cordeliers, nous 
y avons trouvS et par-devant nous est comparue la citoyenne 
Marie Fougerot, fille domestique dudit citoyen Danton. — Laquelle 



APPENDIX VII 375 

nous a dit que ladite citoyenne Antoinette-Gabrielle Charpentier, 
Spouse dudit citoyen Danton, est d^c6dee dans la nuit du dimanche 
au lundi dernier en I'appartement ou nous sommes, par suite de 
maladie ; que ledit Danton est absent par commission de la Con- 
vention ]S"ationale ; que la mere de ladite d^funte Charpentier a 
envoys chercher hier son fils encore en bas kge, qu'elle com par- 
ante, le citoyen Jacques Fougerot, son fr^re qui, depuis quinze 
jours, habite la maison oil nous sommes, et la citoyenne Catherine 
Motin, aussi fiUe domestique dudit citoyen Danton, sont les seuls 
qui restent dans I'appartement dudit Danton; que les clefs des 
meubles et effet8 6tant dans I'appartement ou nous sommes ont 
6t6 prises et emportees par la m^re de ladite d6funte Charpentier 
qui 6tait pr^sente a ses derniers moments ; qu'elle vient d'envoyer 
chercher lesdites clefs chez le citoyen Charpentier, qui demeure 
quai de I'Ecole. Et a sign6 M. Fougerot. 

" A I'instant est comparu le citoyen Frangois-JerSme Charpen- 
tier, demeurant k Paris, quai de I'Ecole, n" 3, section du Louvre. — 
Lequel nous a repr^sent^ un paquet de clefs." 

(a) Extracts from the " Apposition des Scell^s " by M. Thuiller, 
Justice of the Peace, on February 12, 1793, and from the 
*' Vacations" by the same. 

" Surquoy nous, Juge de Paix susdit . . . avons appos^ nos 
scell^s comme il suit, Premierment dans le dit salon ayant vu 
sur la rue des Cordeliers . . . dans un petit salon 6tant en suite 
ayant meme vue . . . dans la chambre k coucher ^tant en suite et 
ayant m^me vue. . . . 

" Le citoyen Charpentier a fait observer des louis que ledit 
citoyen Danton avait remis k sa femme pour payer aux mandats 
de ceux qui viendraient le rejoindre dans la Belgique. — Des 
sceU^s . . . sur une porte d'un cabinet noir qui communique avec 
une petite chambre k coucher . . . sur la porte d'entree dudit 
cabinet noir . . . dans une chambre derniere le salon ayant vue 
sur la cour du Commerce . . . dans un anti-chambre pr^s de la 
cuisine ayant vue sur la cour du Commerce. . . . Dans une chambre 
de domestiques k I'entresol. . . . Dans la petite saUe audessous. 
. . . Dans la salle k manger ayant vue sur la cour du Com- 
merce. . . . Dans une chambre en suite k toilette. . . . Dans 
la cuisine. • . . Dans la cave. . . . 



376 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

"Et le 24 fevrier 1793, ^'^^ deuxi^me de la E^pnblique fran- 
gaise, est comparu devant nous le citoyen Georges-Jacques Danton, 
depute a la Convention . . . lequel nous a requis . . , de proc^der k 
la lev^e des dits scelles . . . apposes apr^s le dec6s de la dite 
dame (the word "citoyenne" is evidently still a little unfamiliar) 
Antoinette Charpentier. . . . 

" Ensuite a la requisition des parties nous nous sommes . . . 
transport's dans una maison, rue du Paeon, Hotel de Tours . . . 
oi il a ^t6 proc'dd k I'estimation d'un cabriolet, d'un cheval, d'une 
jument et harnais. . . . Le C. Antoine-Fran§ois Charpentier, notair6, 
demeurant rue du I'Arbre-Sec, a comparu . . . et le C. Frangois- 
Jerome Charpentier, n°. 3 Quai de I'Ecole. ..." 

(The rest of the document is a long account of the raising of the 
seals on various occasions, from March i to April 5. It contains 
nothing of interest.) 

(b) Summary of the Inventory taken in Danton's House 
AFTER HIS First Wife's Death, 2^th February 1793. 

" L'an mil sept cent quatre vingt-treize, le deuxifeme de la 
R'publique fran§aise, le vingt-cinq fevrier, huit heures du 
matin, 

" A la requite de Georges-Jacques Danton, d'put^ a la Conven- 
tion Rationale, demeurant, etc . . . il va Stre par lesdits notaires a 
Paris soussign's, proc^d' k I'inventaire de tous les biens, meubles, 
&c, . . . dans les lieux composant I'appartement du premier 6tage 
d'une maison situ6e a Paris, rue des Cordeliers, passage du Com- 
merce, appartenant au Sieur Boullenois." 

(Here folloio the details of the Inventory, of ivhich I give a 
summary in English.) 

Livres 

In the Cellar. — Three pieces of Burgundy, 62 bottles of 
claret, 92 bottles of Burgundy, a small barrel of white 
wine ........ 600 

In the Kitchen. — The usual hatterie de cuisine of a French 

household, enumerated in detail, and valued at . 208 

In the Pantry and Offices of the Kitchen. — A few chairs, a 

pair of scales, cups, saucers, and so forth . . 98 

In a Bedroom adjoining, and giving on (he Oour de Commerce. 
— The usual furniture ; probably a dressing-room. Here 
was the watch found on Danton after his execution, hia 



APPENDIX VII 377 

Livres 
writing-table, &c. : the whole, including dishes in the 
cupboard and a stove ..... 264 

In a larger Bedroom giving on the Rue des Cordeliers. — After 
the usual furniture, a small piano, a guitar, two looking- 
glasses, and a writing-table .... 990 

In a little Boom opening out of this. — Usual furniture of a 
small study or boudoir, furnished in the white wood of 
the period ....... 470 

In the Drawing-room. — The furniture, mostly grey and white, 

no piece worth any special mention . . . 992 

A large cupboard near the chimney contained some summer 
clothes put away, and the sword which Danton had 
worn in the old Bataillon of the Cordeliers. The whole 
valued at . . . . . . . 332 

In a little Boom looking on an inner court (evidently used as 
a Library, the list of whose books will be found on 
p. 380) : — Furniture, chiefly bookcases, to the value of 160 

In a little Lumber-room. — Three empty trunks and a bed . 16 

In two little Booms adjoining. — Furniture (mostly put away) 214 

The rest of the inventory mentions the household linen, 
the clothes, the plate, and the jewels. The summary 
is as follows : — 

Household linen, in all . , . , , 734 

Clothes, including every item . . . '925 

Plate, including several wedding presents, marked with 

initials . . . . . . . 291 

Knives and forks other than plate . . . .20 

Jewellery (including two women's rings, set with brilliants, 

and a wedding-ring) ..... 509 

This gives us the whole value of the furniture, clothing, &c., in 
the house, and it amounts to a total of just over 9000 livres, 
that is, about ;^36o. There was ^^o in money in the house, 
which he had left with his wife before going off to Belgium. 

(f) Extracts from the Raising of the Seals after 
Danton's Death. 

" L'an trois de la Eepublique une et indivisible, eejourd'hui 
vingt-cinq messidor, neuf heures de matin, k la requete du bureau 
du Domaine national du d^partement de Paris et en vertu de son 



378 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

arrets en datte du seize susdit mois, sign^ Rennesson et Guillotin, 
portant nomination de nous Jourdain, pour en notre quality de 
commissaire dudit bureau, k I'effet de nous transporter, assists de 
deux commissaires civils de la section du Th^atre-Fran^ais, et 
d'un commissaire de toute autorit^ constitute qui aurait fait 
apposer des scell^s dans la demeure de feu Jacques-Georges 
Danton, condamn^ h. mort le seize germinal, an deuxieme, par le 
Tribunal R^volutionnaire ^tabli k Paris, y proc^der k la lev^e 
d'iceux, et pareillement k celle de ceux dudit bureau du domaine 
national en ladite demeure, sise rue des Cordeliers, n*^ 24, le tout 
en presence du citoyen Charpentier, beau-p^re dudit feu Danton 
et tuteur d'Antoine et Franjois-Georges Danton, enfants mineurs 
dudit deffunt, et de la citoyenne feue Antoinette-Gabrielle Char- 
pentier, fille dudit citoyen Charpentier, ayeul et tuteur desdits 
mineurs ; faire ensuite concurremment avec ledit tuteur, et en pre- 
sence du la citoyenne seconde femme en secondes noces dudit 
Danton, ou de son fond^ de pouvoir, le recollement des meubles 
et eflFets dudit deffunt sur I'inventaire qui en a et6 pr^c^demment 
fait, ensuite mettre le logement cy-dessus d^sign^, et pareillement 
les titres et papiers, meubles et effets qui se trouveront k la 
disposition dudit citoyen Charpentier au nom et quality qu'il pro- 
cMe, moyennant ddcharge valable, destituer le gardien prepose k 
la garde des scell^s, duquel remise lui sera faite par extrait de 
ladite destitution. 

" Nous, Jean-Baptiste Jourdain cy-dessus qualiffie, demeurant 
audit Paris, rue de la Libert^, n° 86, section du Th^atre-Frangais. 

" Etant accompagn^ des citoyens Beurnier et Leblanc, commis- 
saires adjoints au comity civil de la susdite section, requis par 
nous audit comity civil, sommes ensemble et en vertu de I'arr^t^ 
ci-dessus datte, transports en la demeure sus ditte, rue des Corde- 
liers, ditte de V^colle de SantS, audit n** 24, entrS de la cour du 
Commerce, ou Stant nous avons requis le citoyen Desgranges, 
gardien, de nous faire ouverture lors de I'intervention dudit citoyen 
Charpentier et de la citoyenne G^ly, seconde femme dudit Danton. 

•* Clos le present k deux heures de relevSe dudit jour, vingt- 
cinq messidor, an troisi^me de la R^publique une et indivisible, 
et ont lesdits citoyens Charpentier et G^ly, ainsi que nos adjoints 
et ledit citoyen Desgranges, signes le present avec nous, aprea 



APPENDIX VII 379 

lecture, approuv^ trente-neuf mots rayes comme nuls, ainsi sign^s 
Gely, Charpentier Le Blanc, Desgranges, Jourdain et Beurnier. 
Plus has est ^crit. Enregistr^ k Paris, le premier thermidor an 
3®. Regu quatre livres. Sign6 Caron. Deux mots ray^s nuls k 
la presents. 

" Pour coppie conforme, d^livr^e par nous, membres du bureau 
du Domaine national du d^partement de Paris. 

" A Paris, le sept thermidor an troisi^me de la Eepublique une 
et indivisible. 

Sign6 Ebnbsson, Duchatbl. 

•* Collationn^ k Toriginal, d6pos6 aux archives de Seine-et-Oise. 

UarcMviste, 
Saintb-Marib MiviL." 

Tlie lack of education in the Robespierrian functionary 
is worth noting. 



VIII 



CATALOGUE OF DANTON'S LIBRARY 

No part of tlie very scanty evidence we possess upon 
Danton's personal life and habits is of more value than this 
little Ust. It is the small and carefully chosen bookcase 
of a man thoroughly conversant with English and Italian 
as well as with his own tongue. He buys a work in the 
original almost invariably, and collects, in a set of less than 
two hundred works, classic after classic. He has read his 
Johnson and his Pope ; he knows Adam Smith ; he has 
been at the pains to study Blackstone. It must be care- 
fully noted that every book he bought was his own choice. 
There were only a few legal summaries at the old home at 
Arcis, and Danton was a man who never had a reputation 
for learning or for letters, still less had he cause to buy a 
single volume for effect. I know of few documents more 
touching than this catalogue, coming to the light after 
seventy years of silence, and showing us the mind of a man 
who was cut off suddenly and passed into calumny. He 
had read familiarly in their own tongues Rabelais and 
Boccaccio and Shakespeare. 



The following volumes are in English : — 



A translation of Plutarch's Lives . 


8 vela 


Dryden's translation of Virgil 


. 4 » 


Shakespeare ..... 


. . 8 „ 


Pope 


. . 6 „ 


Sussini's Letters ...... 


I vol. 


The Spectator ..... 


. 12 vols 


Clarissa Harlowe 


. . 8 „ 



380 



APPENDIX VIII 



381 



A translation of Don Quixote (probably Smollett's) 4 vols. 
„ „ Gil Bias . . , . . 4 „ 

Essay on Punctuation i vol. 

Johnson's Dictionary (in folio) .... 2 vols. 
Blackstone . . . . . . .1 vol. 

Life of Johnson 2 vols. 

Adam Smith's " Wealth of Nations " (number of vols. 

given as 23, probably an error) 
Robertson's History of Scotland . . . , 2 „ 
„ „ America . . • . 2 „ 

Works of Dr. Johnson . . • • • • 7 >i 



The following are in Italian : — 

(The names are not given in Italian by the lawyer, and I can 
only follow his version.) 

Venuti : History of Modern Eome ... 2 vols. 

Guischardini : History of Italy . . . , 4 „ 
Fontanini : Italian Eloquence . . . • 3 » 
Denina's Italian Revolutions . , . • 2 

Caro's translation of Virgil 2 

Boccaccio's Decameron ...... 2 

Ariosto . 5 

Boiardi's edition of the " Orlando Furioso " . .4 

M^tastase (1) .8 

Dalina(?) 7 

Eeichardet (?) 3 

Davila : History of the French Civil Wars . . 2 
" Letters on Painting and Sculpture " . . .5 
II Morgante de Pulci, 12 mo . . . .3 



The remainder {except one or two legal hooks and classics) 
are in French. 

Metamorphoses d'Ovide, traduit par Banier, in 4to . 4 vols. 

(Euvres de Rousseau, 4to . • . . . 16 „ 

Maison Rustique, 4to ...... 2 „ 

Lucrfece, traduit par La Grange, 8vo . . . 2 „ 
Amours de Daphnis et Chlo^ 4to, Paris, 1745 



382 



THE LIFE OF DANTON 



(Euvres de Lucien, traduit du grec, 8vo 

de Montesquieu, 8vo 

— — de Montaigne, 8vo . , 
— — de Malby, Svo . 

Completes d'Helv^tius, Svo 

Philosopliie de la nature, Svo, 

Histoire Philosophique, de I'Abb^ Kaynal, Svo 

QEuvres de Boulanger, Svo . 

Caracteres de la Bruy^re, Svo 

(Euvres de Brantome, Svo . 

de Rabelais, Svo 

Fables de La Fontaine, avec les figures de Fessard 

Svo 

Contes de La Fontaine, avec belles figures, Svo 
CEuvres de Scarron, Svo 

de Piron, Svo . , 

de Voltaire, 12 mo . . 

Lettres de S^vign^, 1 2mo . , 
CEuvres de Corneille, 1 2 mo . 

de Racine, 12 mo , , 

-^— de Gresset, 12 mo . , 
— — de Moli^re, i2mo 

de Cr^billon, i2mo . . 

de Fi6vd (sic), 12 mo • 

de Regnard, 12 mo , . 

Traits des Dalits, 1 2 mo 

Le Sceau Enlev^ i2mo 

Tableau de la Revolution Franjaise, 

Dictionnaire de Bayle, folio . 

C^sar de Turpin, 4to . 

CEuvres de Pasquier, folio . 

Histoire de France de Velly, Villaret et Garnier, 

i2mo ..... 
Histoire du P. H^nault, Svo . 

Eccl^siastique de Fleury, 4to 

d'Angleterre de Rapin, 4to 

Dictionnaire de I'Acad^mie, 4to 
Corpus Doctorum, 4to . 
Dictionnaire Historique, Svo 



6 vols. 


5 


>» 


3 


>i 


13 


» 


4 


)• 


7 


SI 


10 


t> 


5 


» 


3 


» 


8 


fs 


2 


» 


6 


ir 


2 


•1 


7 


II 


7 


» 


91 


11 


8 


II 


6 


II 


3 


II 


2 


II 


8 


II 


3 


II 


5 


II 


4 


II 


I 


vol. 


3 


vols. 


13 


cahiers 


5 


vols. 


3 


II 


2 


II 


30 


If 


25 


It 


25 


» 


16 


II 


2 


II 


I 


vol. 


8 vols. 



APPENDIX VIII 



3^3 



Abr^g^ de I'Histoire des Voyages, 8vo . 
Dictionuaire d'Histoire Naturelle de Bomard, 8vo 
Virgile de Desfontaines, 8vo 
CEuvres de Buffon, i2m0j figures . 
H^rodote de Larcher, 8vo .... 
OEuvres de Demosthenes et d'Eschyle, par Auger, 

4to 

Histoire Ancienne de Eollin, 1 2mo • , 
Cours d'Etudes de Condillac, 12 mo • . 
Histoire Moderne, 12 mo . . • . 

du Bas-Empire, 1 2mo . • • 

Corpus Juris Civilis, folio .... 
Encyclopedie par Ordre de Matiferes, toutes les livrai 

sons excepts la dernifere (i). 



23 vols. 
15 

4 
58 

7 

4 
14 
16 

30 
22 

3 



The whole is valued at just over a hundred pounds (2800 livres). 



IX 

EXTRACTS FROM THE MEMOIR WRITTEN IN 1846 
BY THE SONS OF DANTON. 

This memoir was written by Danton's sons. Both sur- 
vived laim, the one by fifty-five, the other by sixty-four years 
(1849, 1858). Their fortune was restored to them by the 
Repubhc two years after their father's death (13th April 
1796). Their guardian, Charpentier (their maternal grand- 
father), died in 1 804 ; they then were taken in by Danton's 
mother, Mme. Recordain, who was still living at Arcis. 
She died in October 18 13, a year in which the youngest 
came of age, and they sold out the greater part of the land 
in which Danton's fortune had been invested, and appear 
to have put the capital into one of the new factories which 
sprang up after the peace. In 1832 we find them partners 
and heads of a cotton-spinning establishment at Arcis, 
which they maintain till their deaths. They left, unfortu- 
nately, no surviving sons. 

The manuscript was written for Danton's nephew, the 
son of a younger brother. This nephew became inspector 
of the University of Paris, and lent the MSS. to several 
historians, among others, Michelet and Bougeart. It finally 
passed into the possession of the latter, who gave it to Dr. 
Robinet. This writer printed it in the appendix of the 
" Vie Privee," from which I take it. 

It is not a precise historical document, such as are the 
official reports, receipts, &c., upon which much of this book 
depends. Thus, it ignores the dowry of Mdlle. Charpentier 
and the exact date of the second marriage ; it is weak on 
some points, especially dates, but there attaches to it the 



APPENDIX IX 385 

interest due to tlie very quality from which, these errors 
proceed — I mean its familiar reminiscences. While the 
memory of these men, advanced in life, is at fault in details, 
it is more likely to be accurate in the motives and ten- 
dencies it describes than are we of a hundred years later. 

" Rien au monde ne nous est plus cher que la m^moire de notre 
pfere. EUe a 6t6, elle est encore tous les jours calomniee, outrag^e 
d'une manifere aflfreuse ; aussi notre desir le plus ardent a-t-il tou- 
jours 6t6 de voir I'histoire lui rendre justice. 

" Georges-Jacques Danton, notre p^re, se maria deux fois. II 
epousa d'abord en juin 1787, Antoinette-Gabrielle Charpentier, 
qui mourut le 10 fevrier 1793. Dans le cours de cette meme 
ann^e 1793, nous ne pourrions pas indiquer I'epoque precise, il 
Epousa, en secondes noces, Mademoiselle Sophie Gely, qui vivait 
encore il y a deux ans (nous ne savons pas si elle est morte depuis). 
Notre pfere en mourant ne laissa que deux flls issus de son premier 
mariage. Nous somnes n6s I'un le 18 juin 1790, et I'autre le 
2 fevrier 1792; notre pfere mourut le 5 avril 1794; nous n'avons 
done pas pu avoir le bonlieur de recevoir ses enseignements, ses 
confidences, d'etre initios a ses pens^es k ses projets. Au moment 
de sa mort tout chez lui a 6ti saisi, confisqu^, et plus tard, aucun 
de ses papiers, k I'exception de ses titres de propri6t6, ne nous a 
^t^ rendu. Nous avons et6 ^lev^s par M. Franjois-Jerome Char- 
pentier, notre grand- p^re maternel et notre tuteur. II ne parlait 
jamais sans attendrissement de Danton, son gendre. M. Charpen- 
tier, qui habitait Paris, y mourut en 1804, k une ^poque oil, sans 
doubt, il nous trouvait encore trop jeunes pour que nous puissions 
bien appr^cier ce qu'il aurait pu nous raconter de la vie politique 
de notre pfere, car il s'abstint de nous en parler. Du reste, il avait 
environ quatre-vingts ans quand il mourut ; et, dans ses dernieres 
ann^es, son esprit paraissait beaucoup plus occup^ de son avenir 
dans un autre monde que de ce qui s'^tait pass^ dans celui-ci. 
Apr^s la mort de notre grand-pfere Charpentier, M. Victor Char- 
pentier, son fils, fut nomm6 notre tuteur. II mourut en 18 10. 
Quoiqu'il habit§.t Paris, nous revlnmes en 1805 k Arcis, pour ne 
plus le quitter. La fin de notre enfance et le commencement de 
notre jeunesse s'y ^coulerent aupres de la m^re de notre pere. Elle 
6tait aflfaiblie par I'kge, les infirmit^s et les chagrins. C'etait tou- 

2 B 



386 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

jours les yeux remplis de larmes qu'elle nous entretenait de son 
fils, des innombrables t^moignages d'affection qu'il lui avait donnas, 
des tendres caresses dont il I'accablait. Elle fit de frequents voyages 
h Paris ; il aimait tant a la voir a ses c6t^s ! II avait en elle une 
confiance enti^re ; elle en 6tait digne, et, s'il elit eu des secrets, 
elle les elit connus, et nous les eussions connus par elle. Tres 
souvent elle nous parlait de la Revolution; mais, en embrasser 
tout Fensemble d'un seul coup d'oeil, en apprecier les causes, en 
suivre la marche, en juger les hommes et les ev^nements, en dis- 
tinguer tons les partis, deviner leur but, d^meler les fils qui les 
faisaient agir, tout cela n'etait pas chose facile, on conviendra : 
aussi, quoique la m^re de Danton eut beaucoup d'intelligence et 
d'esprit, on ne sera pas surpris que, d'aprfes ses r^cits, nous n'ayons 
jamais connu la Revolution que d'une maniere extremement con- 
fuse. . 

" Sa mfere, d'accord avec tous ceux qui nous ont si souvent parie 
de lui pour I'avoir connu, et que notre position sociale ne fera, 
certes, pas suspecter de flatterie, sa mfere nous I'a toujours d^peint 
comme le plus honnete homme que Ton puisse rencontrer, comme 
I'homme le plus aimant, le plus franc, le plus loyal, le plus d^sin- 
tdresse, le plus g^n^reux, le plus d^vou^ a ses parents, a ses amis, 
k son pays natal et a sa patrie. Quoi d'^tonnant, nous dira-t-on ? 
Dans la bouche d'une m^re, que prouve un pareil 41oge ? Rien, 
sinon qu'elle adorait son fils. On ajoutera : Est-ce que pour juger 
un homme la poster ite devra s'en rapporter aux declarations de la 
mere et des fils de cet homme 1 Non, sans doute, elle ne le devra 
pas, nous ne convenons, Mais aussi, pour juger ce meme homme 
devra-t-elle s'en rapporter aux declarations de ses ennemis 1 Elle 
ne le devra pas davantage. Et pourtant que ferait-elle si, pour 
juger Danton, elle ne consultait que les ' Memoires ' de ceux qu'il 
a toujours combattus 1 . . . 

" On a reproche a Danton d'avoir exploite la Revolution pour 
amasser scandaleusement une fortune enorme. Nous allons prouver 
d'une maniere incontestable que c'est a tres grand tort qu'on lui a 
adresse ce reproche. Pour atteindre ce but, nous allons comparer 
retat de sa fortune au commencement de la Revolution avec I'etat 
de sa fortune au moment de sa mort. 

*' Au moment ou la Revolution edata, notre p^re etait avocat 
aux conseils du Roi. C'est un fait dont il n'est pas n^cessaire de 



APPENDIX IX 387 

fournir la preuve : ses ennemis eux-m^mes ne le contestent pas. 
Nous ne pouvons pas ^tablir d'un maniere precise et certaine ce 
qu'il poss^dait k cette ^poque, cependant nous disons que, s'il ne 
poss^dait rien autre chose (ce qui n'est pas prouv6) il possedait au 
moins sa charge, et voici sur ce point notre raisonnement : — 

" (1°) Quelques notes qui sent en notre possession nous prouvent 
que Jacques Danton, notre grand-pfere, d^c^d^ a Arcis, le 24 f^vrier 
1762, laissa des immeubles sur le finage de Plancy et sur celui 
d' Arcis, il est done presumable que notre p^re, n^ le 26 octobre 
1759, et par consequent rest^ mineur en tres bas age, a du possMer 
un patrimoine quelconque, si modique qu'on veuille le supposer." 

[Here follow guesses as to how he paid for his place in the 
Gonseils. They are of no importance now, as we possess the docu- 
ments which give us this (p. 365). The only point of interest in 
the passage omitted is the phrase, " probably our mother brought 
some dowry." We know its amount (p. 366), but the sentence 
is an interesting proof of the complete dislocation which Germinal 
produced in the family.] 

" Nous allons ^tablir que ce qu'il possedait au moment de sa 
mort n'^tait que 1' Equivalent k peu prfes de sa charge d'avocat aux 
conseils. Nous n'avons jamais su s'il a ii€ fait des actes de partage 
de son patrimoine et de celui de ses femmes, ni, si, au moment de 
la confiscation de ses biens, il en a EtE dresse inventaire, mais nous 
Savons trfes-bien et tres-exactement ce que nous avons recueilli de 
sa succession, et nous allons le dire, sans rester dans le vague sur 
aucun point, car c'est ici que, comme nous I'avons annoncE, nos 
arguments vont 6tre basEs sur des actes authentiques. 

" Nous ferons observer que I'etat que nous allons donner com- 
prend sans distinction ce qui vient de notre pere et de notre mere. 

" Une loi de fevrier 1791 ordonna que le prix des charges et 
offices supprimEs serait rembourse par I'Etat aux titulaires. La 
charge que Danton possedait etait de ce nombre. Nous n'avons 
jamais su, pas meme approximativement, combien elle lui avait 
eolith. II en regut le remboursement sans doute, car pr^cisEment 
vers cette dpoque, il commenga h. acheter des immeubles dont voici 
le detail : — 

"Le 24 mars 1791, il achate aux ench^res, moyennant quarante- 
huit mille deux cents livres, un bien national provenant du clerge, 



388 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

consistant en une ferme appelee ITuisement, situ^e sur le finage de 
Chassericourt, canton de Chavanges, arrondissement d'Arcis, d^- 
partement de I'Aube, h, sept lieues d'Arcis. . . . Danton avait 
achetd cette ferme la somme de quarante-huit mille deux cents, 
ci . 48,200 liv. 



A reporter . . .48,200 liv 
"12 avril 91. — II achate aux ench^res du district 
d'Arcis, par I'entremise de maitre Jacques Jeannet- 
Boursier ........ 

[Then follows a list of purchases made in the month of April 
1 791, of which the most important is an extension to the house at 
Arcis — the total of these is 33,600 livres ; and in October 1791 a 
few acres of land in the town and a patch of wood for 3160 livres. 
Then follows the sum total.] 

"Total du prix de toutes les acquisitions d'immeubles faites 
par Danton en mil sept cent quatre-vingt-onze : quatre-vingt-quatre 
mille neuf cent soixante livres, ci , . . , 84,960 liv. 

" On doit remarquer qu'il est presumable que la plus grande 
partie de ces acquisitions a dli etre payee en assignats qui, k cette 
^poque, perdaient d^ja de leur valeur et dont, par consequent, la 
valeur nominale 6tait sup^rieure a leur valeur r^elle en argent, 
d'od il r^sulterait que le prix reel en argent des immeubles ci-dessus 
indiqu^s aurait 6t6 inf^rieur a 84,960 livres. 

" Depuis cette derni^re acquisition du 8 novembre 1791 jusqu'k 
sa mort, Danton ne fit plus aucune acquisition importante : — 

[Here then is what Danton left.] 

"(1°) La ferme de Nuisement (vendue par nous le 23 juillet 

1813); 

"(2°) Sa modeste et vieille maison d'Arcis, avec sa d^pend- 
ance, le tout contenant non plus 9 arpents, 3 denr^es, 14 carreaux 
(ou bien 4 hectares, 23 ares, 24 centiares) seulement, comme au 
13 avril 1 791, ^poque oil il en fit I'acquisition de Mademoiselle 
Plot, mais par suite des additions qu'il y avait faites, 1 7 arpents, 
3 denrees, 52 carreaux (ou bien 786 ares, 23) ; 

"(3°) 19 arpents, i denrees, 41 carreaux (898 ares, 06) de pr^ 
et saussaie ; 



APPENDIX IX 389 

"(4*>) 8 arpents, 1 denr^e, 57 carreaux (369 ares, 96) de bois; 
"(5°) 2 denr^es, 40 carreaux (14 ares, 07) de terre situ^e dans 
I'enceinte d'Arcis. 

"l!Tous d^clarons k qui voudra I'entendre et au besoin nous 
d^clarons sous la foi du serment, que nous n'avons recueilli de la 
succession de Georges-Jacques Danton, notre pfere, et d'Antoinette- 
Gabrielle Charpentier, notre mfere, rien, absolument rien autre 
chose que less immeubles dont nous venons de donner I'etat, que 
quelques portraits de famille et le buste en platre de notre mere, 
lesquels, longtemps apr^s la mort de notre second tuteur, nous 
furent remis par son Spouse, et que quelques effets mobiliers qui 
ne m^ritent pas qu'on en fasse I'^num^ration ni la description, 
mais que nous n'en avons recueilli aucune somme d'argent, aucune 
cr^ance, en un mot rien de ce qu'on appelle valeurs mobiliferes, k 
I'exception pourtant d'une rente de 100 fr. 5 p. 100 dont MM. 
Defrance et D^tape, receveurs de rentes a Paris, rue Chabannais, 
n° 6, ont op6r6 la vente pour nous le 18 juin 1825, rente qui avait 
et6 achet^e pour nous par I'un de nos tuteurs. . . . 

" On pourra nous faire une objection qui m^rite une r^ponse ; 
on pourra nous dire : Vous n'avez recueilli de la succession de votre 
p^re et de votre mfere que les immeubles et les meubles dont vous 
venez de faire la declaration, mais cela ne prouve pas que la fortune 
de votre p^re, au moment de sa mort, ne se composat que de ces 
seuls objets ; car sa condamnation ay ant entrain^ la confiscation de 
tons ses biens sans exception, la R^publique a pu en vendre et en 
a peut-etre vendu pour des sommes considerables. Vous n'avez 
peut-^tre recueilli que ce qu'elle n'a pas vendu. 

" Yoici notre r^ponse : — 

" Les meubles et les immeubles confisqu^s k la mort de notre 
p^re dans le d^partement de I'Aube et non vendus, furent remis 
en notre possession par un arr§t^ de I'administration de ce departe- 
ment, en date du 24 germinal an IV. (13 avril 1796), arrets dont 
nous avons une copie sous les yeux, arr^t^ pris en consequence 
d'une petition presentee par notre tuteur, arrete bas6 sur la loi du 
14 floreal an III. (3 mai 1795), qui consacre le principe de la 
restitution des biens des condamnes par les tribunaux et les com- 



390 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

missions r^volutionnaires, bas^ sur la loi du 2 1 prairial an IIL (9 
juin 1 795), qui l^ve le s^questre sur ces biens et en rfegle le mode 
de restitution ; enfin, arrete bas^ sur la loi du 13 thermidor an III. 
(31 juillet 1795), <^ont il ne rappelle pas les dispositions. 

" L'administration du d^partement de I'Aube, dans la m^me 
deliberation, arrete que le produit des meubles et des immeubles 
qui ont ^t^ vendus et des interets qui ont 6t& pergus depuis le 14 
flor^al an III. (3 mai 1795), montant a la somme de douze mille 
quatre cent cinq livres quatre sous quatre deniers, sera restitu^ k 
notre tuteur, en bons au porteur admissibles en payement de 
domaines nationaux provenant d'emigres seulement. Nous ne 
savons pas si notre tuteur regut ces bons au porteur ; s'il les rejut, 
quel usage il en fit ; nous savons seulement qu'il n'acheta pas de 
biens d'emigres. II r^sulte evidemment de cet arrets de I'adminis- 
tration du d^partement de I'Aube, que dans ce d^partement le 
produit des meubles et immeubles provenant de Danton et vendus 
au profit de la Eepublique, ne s'est pas ^lev^ au-dessus de 12,405 
livres 4 sous 4 deniers. C'^tait le total de I'^tat de reclamation 
pr^sente par notre tuteur dans sa petition, et lout le monde- 
pensera, comme nous, qu'il n'aura pas manqu^ de faire valoir tons 
nos droits. On pent remarquer que dans cet arrets il est dit que 
ces 12,405 livres sont le montant du produit des meubles et des 
immeubles vendus, et des interets qui ont ete pergus depuis le 14 
floreal an III. (3 mai 1795). . . . Mais si d'un cote on doit ajouter 
12,405 livres, d'un autre cote on doit retrancher 16,065 livres qui 
restaient dues aux personnes qui ont vendu k notre p^re les 
immeubles dont nous avons herite. . . . 

" II est done etabli d'abord que dans le departement de I'Aube, 
le prix des meubles et des immeubles qui ont ete vendus n'a pas 
pu s'eiever au-dessus de 12,405 livres; ensuite que notre pfere, au 
moment de sa mort, devait encore 16,065 livres sur le prix d'acqui- 
sition des immeubles qu'il y possedait. . . . 

" Maintenant nous allons citer quelques faits authentiques qui 
pourront faire apprecier la bonte de son coeur. Nous avons vu 
precedemment que ce fut en mars et en avril 1791 qu'il acheta la 
majeure partie, on pourrait meme dire la presque totalite des 
immeubles qu'il possedait quand il mourut. 

" Voici un des sentiments qui agitaient son ccBur en mars et en 
avril 1 791. II desirait augmenter la modeste aisance de sa m^re, 



APPENDIX IX 391 

de sa tonne mere qu'il adorait, Veut-on savoir ce qu'il s'empressa 
de faire a son entree en jouissance de ces immeubles qu'il venait 
d'acheter ? Jetons un regard sur I'acte que nous tenons dans les 
mains. II a ^t^ pass^ le iS avril 1791 (deux jours apr^s la vente 
faite k Danton par Mademoiselle Plot) par-devant M® Odin que en 
a gard^ la minute, et M^ Etienne son collegue, notaires k Troyes. 
Danton y fait donation entre-vifs, pure, simple et irrevocable, a sa 
mfere de six cents livres de rentes annuelles et viag^res, payables 
de six mois en six mois, dont les premiers six mois payables au 15 
octobre 1791. Sur cette rente de 600 livres, Danton veut qu'en 
cas de d^cfes de sa mere, 400 livres soient reversibles sur M. Jean 
Eecordain, son mari (M. Recordain ^tait un homme fort ais^ 
lorsqu'il ^pousa la m5re de Danton ; il ^tait extremement bon ; sa 
bonte allait meme jusqu'a la faiblesse, puisque, par sa complaisance 
pour de pr^tendus amis dont il avait endoss^ des billets, il perdit 
une grande partie de ce qu'il avait apport^ en mariage, n^anmoins 
c'etait un si excellent homme, il avait toujours ^t^ si bon pour les 
enfants de Jacques Danton, qu'ils le regardaient comme leur 
veritable pere ; aussi Danton, son beau-fils, avait-il pour lui beau- 
coup d'affection). Le vif desir que ressent Danton de donner aux 
donataires des marques certaines de son amiti^ pour eux, est la 
seule cause de cette donation. Cette rente viag^re est k prendre 
sur la maison et sur ses d^pendances, situ^es k Arcis, que Danton 
vient d'acqu^rir le 13 avril 1791. Tel fut son premier acte de 
prise de possession. 

"On remarquera que cette propriety, au moment oii Made- 
moiselle Plot la vendit, ^tait lou^e par elle k plusieurs locataires 
qui lui payaient ensemble la somme de 600 livres annuellement. 
Si Danton etit ^t^ riche et surtout aussi riche que ses ennemis ont 
voulu le faire croire, son grande cceur ne se ftit pas content^ de 
faire k sa mere une pension si modique. Pour faire cette donation 
Danton aurait pu attendre qu'il vint k Arcis ; mais il ^tait si press6 
d'ob^ir au sentiment d'amour filial qu'il ^prouvait que, des le 1 7 
mars 1791, il avait donn4 k cet effet une procuration sp^ciale k M. 
Jeannet-Bourcier, qui ex^cuta son mandat deux jours apres avoir 
achet6 pour Danton la propri^t^ de Mademoiselle Piot. Aussitot 
que la maison ^tait devenue vacante et disponible, Danton, qui 
aimait tant etre entoure de sa fandlle, avait voulu que sa in^re et 
son beau-p^re vinssent I'liabiter, ainsi que M. Menuel, sa femme 



392 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

et leurs enfants (M. Menuel avait ^pous^ la sceur atn^e de 
Danton). 

" Au 6 aolit 1792 Danton ^tait k Arcis ; on ^tait k la veille 
d'un grand ^v^nement qu'il pr^voyait sans doute. Au milieu des 
mille pens^es qui doivent alors I'agiter, au milieu de I'inqui^tude 
que doivent lui causer les perils auxquels il va s'exposer, quelle 
idde pr^domine, quelle crainte vient I'atteindre? II pense k sa 
mere, il craint de n'avoir pas suffisamment assur^ son mort et sa 
tranquillity ; en voici la preuve dans cet acte pass6 le 6 aout 1792 
par-devant M^ Knot, notaire k Arcis. Qu'y lit-on? 'Danton 
voulant donner k sa mere des preuves des sentiments de respect et 
de tendresse qu'il a toujours eus pour elle, il lui assure, sa vie 
durant, une habitation convenable et commode, lui fait donation 
entre-vifs, pure, simple et irrevocable, de I'usufruit de telles parts 
et portions qu'elle voudra choisir dans la maison et d^pendances 
situ^es k Arcis, rue des Fonts, qu'il a aquise de Mademoiselle Piot 
de Courcelles, et dans laquelle maison sa mfere fait alors sa demeure, 
et de I'usufruit de trois denr^es de terrain a prendre dans tel 
endroit du terrain qu'elle voudra choisir, pour jouir desdits objets 
k compter du jour de la donation. Si M. Jean Eecordain survit k 
sa femme, donation lui est faite par le meme acte de I'usufruit 
de la moiti6 des objets qu'aura choisis et dont aura joui sa 
femme. . . . 

"Voici encore une pifece, peu importante en elle-meme k la 
v^rit^ mais qui honore Danton et qui prouve sa bont^ : c'est un- 
p^tition en date du 30 thermidor an II. (17 aotit 1794), adress^e 
aux citoyens administrateurs du d^partement de Paris, par Mar- 
guerite Hariot (veuve de Jacques Geoffroy, charpentier k Arcis), 
qui expose que par acte pass^ devant M® Finot, notaire k Arcis, le 
II d^cembre 1791, Danton, dont elle ^tait la nourrice, lui avait 
assur^ et constitu^ une rente viagbre de cent livres dont elle de- 
vait commencer k jouir k partir du jour du d^c^s de Danton, 
ajoutant que, de son vivant, il ne bornerait pas sa g^n^rosit^ k 
cette somme. Elle demande, en consequence, que les administrae 
teurs du d^partement de Paris, ordonnent que cette rente viag^re 
lui soit pay^e k compter du jour du d^cfes et que le principal en 
soit pr^lev^ sur ses biens confisqu^s au profit de la Eepublique. 
E"ous ne savons pas ce qui fut ordonnd. Cette brave femme, que 
notre p^re ne manquait jamais d'embrasser avec effusion et k 



APPENDIX IX 393 

plusieurs reprises chaque fois qu'il venait k Arcis, ne lui surv^cut 
que pendant pen d'ann^es. 

" La recherche que nous avons faite dans les papiera qui nous 
sont restes de la succession de notre grand'mere Recordain, papiers 
dont nous ne pouvons pas avoir la totality, ne nous a fourni que 
ces trois pieces autJientiques qui t^moignent en faveur de la bont^ 
de Danton dans sa vie priv^e. Quant aux traditions orales que 
nous avons pu recueillir, elles sont en petit nombre et trop peu 
caract^ristiques pour etre rapport^es. Nous dirons seulement que 
Danton aimait beaucoup la vie champetre et les plaisirs qu'elle 
peut procurer. II ne venait k Arcis que pour y jouir, au milieu 
de sa famille et de ses amis, du repos, du calme et des amusements 
de la campagne. II disait dans son langage sans recherche, k 
Madame Recordain, en Fembrassant : * Ma bonne mfere, quand 
aurai-je le bonheur de venir demeurer aupr^s de vous pour ne plus 
vous quitter, et n'ayant plus a penser qu'k planter mes choux ? ' 

" ISTous ne savons pas s'il avait des ennemis ici, nous ne lui en 
avons jamais connu aucun. On noiis a tres-souvent parl^ de lui 
avec ^loge ; mais nous n'avons jamais entendu prononcer un mot 
qui lui Mt injurieux, ni meme defavorable, pas meme quand nous 
^tions au college ; Ik pourtant les enfants, incapables de juger la 
port^e de ce qu'ils disent, n'h^sitent pas, dans une querelle 
occasionn^e par le motif le plus frivole, k s'adresser les reproches 
les plus durs et les plus outrageants. Nos condisciples n'avaient 
done jamais entendu attaquer la la m^moire de notre pfere, II 
n'avait done pas d'ennemis dans son pays. 

" Nous croyons ne pas devoir omettre une anecdote qui se rap- 
porte k sa vie politique. Nous la tenons d'un de nos amis qui I'a 
souvent entendu raconter par son pfere, M. Doulet, homme trSs re- 
commandable et trfes digne de foi, qui, sous I'Empire, fut long- 
temps maire de la ville d' Arcis. Danton ^tait k Arcis dans le 
mois de novembre 1793. Un jour, tandis qu'il se promenait dans 
son jardin avec M. Doulet, arrive vers eux une troisi^me personne 
marchant k grands pas, tenant un papier k la main (c'^tait un 
journal) et qui, aussit6t qu'elle fut k port^e de se faire entendre, 
s'^crie : Bonne nouvelle ! bonne nouvelle ! et eUe s'approche. — 
Quelle nouvelle 1 dit Danton. — Tiens, lis ! les Girondins sont 
condamnds et ex^cut^s, r^pond la personne qui venait d'arriver. — 
Et tu appelles cela une bonne nouvelle, malheureux ? a'^crie Dan- 



394 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

ton h son tour, Danton, dent les yeux s'emplissent aussitot de 
larmes. La mort des Girondins une bonne nouvelle ? Miserable ! 
— Sans doute, r^pond son interlocuteur ; n'^tait-ce pas des fac- 
tieux? — Des factieux, dit Danton. Est-ce que nous ne sommes 
pas des factieux? I^ous m^ritons tous la mort autant que les 
Girondins ; nous subirons tous, les uns apr^s les autres, le meme 
sort qu'eux. Ce fut ainsi que Danton, le Montagnard, accueillit 
la personne qui vint annoncer la mort des Girondins, auxquels 
tant d'autres, en sa place, n'eussent pas manqu^ de garder 
rancune. ... 

" La France aujourd'hui si belle, si florissante, te placera alors 
au rang qui t'appartient parmi ses enfants g^n^reux, magnanimes, 
dont les efforts intr^pides, inouis, sont parvenus k lui ouvrir, au 
milieu de difficult^s et de dangers innombrables, un chemin k la 
liberty k la gloire, au bonheur. Un jour enfin, Danton, justice 
complete sera rendue a ta m^moire ! Puissent tes fils avant de 
descendre dans la tombe, voir ce beau jour, ce jour tant d(^sir^." 

Danton. 



NOTES OF TOPINO-LEBRUN, JUROR OF THE 
REVOLUTIONARY TRIBUNAL 

The interest of these notes is as follows: — They are the 
only verbatim account of the trial which we possess. There 
are of course the official accounts (especially that of 
Coffinhal), and upon them is largely based the account in 
M. Wallon's Tribunal Revolutionnaire ; but these rough 
and somewhat disconnected notes, badly spelt and abbre- 
viated, were taken down without bias, and as the words 
fell from the accused. Topino-Lebrun, the painter, was at 
that time thirty-one years of age, a strong Montagnard of 
course ; he hesitated to condemn Danton, but was overborne 
by his fellows, especially by his friend and master David. 

These notes were kept at the archives of the Prefecture 
of Police until the year of the war. In 1867 M. Labat 
made copies, and gave one to Dr. Robinet, and one to M. 
Claretie. Each of these writers has used them in their 
works on the Dantonites. The original document was 
burnt when, in May 1871, the Commune attempted to 
destroy the building in which they were preserved. 

There are given below only those portions which directly 
refer to Danton and his friends. 

Au president, qui lui demande ses nom, prenoms, dge et domicile, 
il rdpond : Georges-Jacques Danton, 34 ans, ne k Arcis-sur-Aube, 
departement de I'Aube, avocat, d6put^ k la Convention. Bient6t 
ma demeure dans le n6ant et mon nom au Pantheon de I'histoire, 
quoi qu'on en puisse dire ; ce qui est trfes siir et ce qui m'importe 
peu. Le peuple respectera ma tete, oui, ma tete guillotin^e ! 



396 THE LIFE OF DANTON 



Seance db 14 Germinal (13 Avril). 

[Westermann having asked to be examined, the judge 
said it was " une forme inutile."] 

Danton. Nous sommes cependent ici pour la forme. 

Vest, insiste. Un juge vas {sic) I'interroger. 

Danton dit : Pourvu qu'on nous donne la parole et largement. 
je suis slir de confondre mes accusateurs ; et si le peuple frangais 
est ce qu'il doit etre, je serai oblig6 de demander leur gr^ce. 

Gamille. Ah ! nous aurons la parole, c'est tout ce que nous 
demandons (grande et sincere gaiety de tous les d^put^s accuses). 

Danton. C'est Barr^re qui est patriote k present, n'est-ce-pas ? 
(Aux jur^s) — C'est moi qui ai fait instituer le tribunal, ainsi je 
dois m'y connaitre. 

Vest. Je demanderai k me mettre tout nu devant le peuple, 
pour qu'on me voye. J'ai re9U sept blessures, toutes par devant ; 
je n'en ai regu qu'une par derriere : mon acte d'accusation. 

Danton. Nous respecterons le tribunal, parceque, &c. . . . 
Danton montre Cambon et dit: Nous crois-tu conspirateurs ? 
Voyez il rit ; il ne le croit pas. Ecrivez qu'il a rit. ... 

Danton. Moi vendu ? un homme de ma trempe est impayable ! 
La preuve? Me taisais je lorsque j'ai d^fendu Marat; lorsque 
j'ai 6t^ d^cr^t^ deux fois sous Mirabeau ; lorsque j'ai lutt^ contre 
La Fayette ? — Mon affiche, pour insurger, aux 5 et 6 octobre ! 
Que I'accusateur (Fouquier-Tinville) qui m'accuse d'aprfes la Con- 
vention, administre la preuve, les semi-preuves, les indices de ma 
v^nalit^ ! J'ai trop servi ; la vie m'est k charges. Je demands 
des commissionaires de la Convention pour recevoir ma denonciation 
sur le systems de dictature. 

J'ai ^t^ nomm^ administrateur par un liste triple, le dernier, 
par de bons citoyens en petit nombre [that is, substitute in 
December 1790]. 

Je forgai Mirabeau, aux Jacobins, de rester h. son poste ; je I'ai 
combattu, lui qui voulait s'en retourner k Marseille. 

Oil es ce patriote, qu'il vienne, je demande a etre confondu, 
qu'il paraisse, j'ai emp^ch^ le voyage de Saint-Cloud, j'ai 6t6 d^cr^t^ 
de prise de corps pour le Champ de Mars. 



APPENDIX X 397 

J'offre de prouver le contraire [that is, the contrary of St. 
Just's statement that he was unmolested when he fled to 
Arcis] et lisez la feuille de I'orateur : Des assassins f urent envoy^s 
pour m'assassiner a Arcis, I'une a ^t^ arr^te. — Un huissier vint 
pour mettre le d^cret a execution, je fuyais done, et le peuple 
voulut en faire justice. — J'etais k la maison de mon beau-p^re ; 
on I'investit, on maltraita mon beau-fr^re pour moi, je me sauvais 
(sic) k Londres, je suis revenu lorsque Garran fut nomm^. On 
offirit a Legendre 50,000 ^cus pour m'^gorger. Lorsque les Lameth 
. . . devenu partisans de la cour, Danton les combattit aux 
Jacobins, devant le peuple, et demanda la E^publique. 

Sous la legislature je dis : la preuve que c'est la cour qui veut 
la guerre c'est qu'elle a [a word illegible] I'initiative et la 
sanction. Que les patriotes se rallient et alors si nous ne pouvons 
Yous vaincre nous triompherons de I'Europe (?). 

— Billaud-Varennes ne me pardonne pas d'avoir ^t^ mon secre- 
taire. Quelle proposition avez-vous f aite centre les Brissotins ? — La 
loi de Publicola ! Je portal le cartel k Louvet, qui refusa. Je man- 
quai d'etre assassin^ k la Commune. — J'ai dit a Brissot, en plein, 
ConseU, tu porteras la tete sur Techafaud, et je I'ai rappeM ici a 
Lebrun. 

— J'avai prepare le 10 aoAt et je fus a Arcis, parce que Danton 
est bon fils, passer trois jours, faire mes adieux a ma mfere et r^gler 
mes affaires il y a des t^moins. — On m'a revu solidement, je ne 
me suis point couche. J'etais aux Cordeliers, quoique substitut 
de la Commune. Je dis au ministre Clavieres, que venait de la 
part de la Commune^ que nous alliens sonner I'insurrection. Apr^s 
avoir r^gle toutes les operations et le moment de I'attaque, je me 
mis sur le lit comme un soldat, avec ordre de m'avertir. Je sortis 
a une heure et je fus k la Commune devenue revolutionnaire. Je 
fis I'arret de mort contre Mandat, qui avait I'ordre de tirer sur le 
peuple. On mit le maire en arrestation et j'y restais (sic) suivant 
I'avis des patriotes. Mon discours k FAssembl^e legislative. 

— Je faisais la guerre au Conseil; je n'avais que ma voix, 
quoique j'eusse de I'influence. 

— Mon parent, qui m'accompagna en Angleterre [Mergez, a 
volunteer in 1792, and later a general of Napoleon's] avait 
dix huit ans. 

— Je crois encore Fabre bon citoyen. 



398 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

— J'atteste que je n'ai point donn^ ma voix a d'Orleans, qu'on 
prouve que je I'ai fait nommer. 

— J'etis 400 mille f. sur les 2 millions pour faire la rev., 200 
mille livres pour choses secretes. J'ai depense devant Marat et 
Robespierre pour tons les commissaires des departements. Calo- 
mines de Brissot. J'ai donne 6000 a Billaud pour aller k I'armee. 
Les autres 200 mille, j'ai donne ma comptabilite de 130 mille et 
le reste je I'ai remis. 

. . . Fabre la disponibilit^ de payer les commissaires, parce 
que Billaud- Varenne avait de refus^ (sic). 

II n'est pas k ma connaissance que Fabre precha la f^d^ralisme. 

— J'embrasserais mon ennemi pour la patrie, k laquelle je don- 
nerais mon corps a d^vorer. 

Je nie et prouve le contraire. Ce fut Marat qui m'envoya un 
porte feuille et les pieces, et j'avais fait arreter Duport. Se a 
ete jug^ k Melun, d'apr^s une loi. Liu et Lameth ont voulu me 
faire assassiner. Ministre de la Justice, j'ai fait executer la loi. 
Pour mon fait, je n'avais pas de preuves judiciaires. 

— La guerre feinte n'est que depuis quinze jours, et le Brissotins 
m'ont pardieu bien attaqu^. Lisez le Moniteiir. Barbaroux a fait 
demander par le bataillon de Marseille ma tete et celles de Marat 
et de Robespierre, Marat avait son caract^re volcanis^, celui de 
Robespierre tenace et ferme, et moi, je servais a ma maniere. — 
Je n'ai vu qu'une fois Dumourier, qui me tata pour le ministre : 
ie repondis que je ne le serais qu'on bruit de canon. II m'ecri- 
vit ensuite. — Plac^ \k, Kelerman {sic) voulait passer la Marne et 
Dumourier ne le voulait pas ; embarrass^ et mon dictateur, je 
sou tins le plan de Dumourier, qui reussit. — Craignant la jalousie 
de deux generaux, j'envoyai Fabre, etc. . . . avait vu Vesterman, 
au 10, le sabre a la main. 

— Je talonnai Servan et Laenee ; je n'ai connu de plan militaire 
que celui de Dumourier et de Kelerman, et Billaud fut nomme 
par moi pour surveiller Dumourier; il eu a rendu compte k la 
legislature et aux Jacobin. Ordre d'examiner ce que c'etait . . . 
cette retraite {sic). La Convention a envoy^ trois commissaires. 

— Moi, ministre, j'embrassais la masse et les details de la Justice. 

— Billaud m'a dit qu'il ne sarait pas si Dumourier 4tait un 
trattre ; d'ailleurs c'etait une surabondance de patriotisme. 

— Sur, la Belgique, repete son dire aux Jacobins. 



APPENDIX X 399 

— Le piege des Brissots etait de faire croire que nous desorgani- 
sions les armies. 

— On me refuse des temoins, aliens je ne me defends plus ! 

— Je vous fais d'ailleurs mille excuses de ce qu'il y a de trop 
chaud, c'est mon caractfere. 

— Le peuple dechirera par morceaux mes ennemis avant trois 
mois. 

STANCE Du 15 Germinal (4 A veil). 

Herault. Sur le petit Capet, nie le fait. — II fut nomm^ pour 
la partie diplomatique avec Barrere. Declare que jamais il ne 
s'est mele de negociations. Nie avoir jamais fait imprimer aucune 
chose en diplomatie. Deforgues envoya Dubuisson. 

Herault Je ne congois rien a ce galimathias. Je me suis 
oppos^ k renvoi de Salavie. C'est un moyen employ^ par nos 
ennemis. Envoy^ dans le Bas-Ehin par le Comit^, je travaill^ 
{sic) avec Berthelemy (sic) k la neutralite de la Suisse et j'ai sauv^ 
k la Republique un arm^e de soixante-mille hommes. — Jamais je 
n'ai communique k Proly rien en politique, il n'y en avait pas. 
Au surplus, il fallait me confronter avec Proly. — J'ai ^t^ trompe 
comme j'a jaie st fois [J. Jay St. Foix] comme la Convention, 
comme jam bon [this does not mean haifn, but Jean-Bon St. 
Andre], qui le voulait emmener secretaire, comme Golot. Comme 
Marat, Proly a hth port^ en triomphe. La Convention, par un 
decret solemnel, a regu mes explications. Anacharsis me dit 
vient [sic) diner avec moi, diner avec Dufourni, etc. . . . J'ai 
laiss^ la veuve Cbemineau, etc. L'huillier ! c'est k I'instigation 
de Clootz. 

J'ai connu I'abbe guillotin^ en troie [that is, in Troyes] 
{sic), dans mon exil il ^tait chanoine et non refractaire. C'est 
done un plaisanterie. II n'etait pas soumis au serment, il m'avait 
assist^ dans mon exil. 

Au 14 juillet, k la Bastille, j'ai eu deux hommes tu^s k mes 
c6t^s. Maltrait^ par mes parents, j'ai voyage, j'ai ^t^ incarc^r^ 
trois semaines en Sardaigne et je suis revenu. 

Camille. Lors de sa dispute avec Saint-Just, celui-ce lui 
dit qu'il le ferait p^rir, — j'ai denonce Dumourier avant Marat; 
d'Orleans, le premier, j'ai ouvert la Revolution et ma mort va la 
farmer. — Marat s'est trompd sur Proly. Quel est I'homme qui 



400 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

n'a pas eu son Dilon 1 Depuis le ii° 4 [that is, of tlie Vieux 
Cordelier^ je n'ai ^cris (sic) que pour me r^tracter. J'ai 
attach^ le grelot h toutes les factions. On m'a encourag^ ! ^crit 
(sic) etc. demasque la faction Hubert, il est bon que quelqu'un 
le fasse. 

Lacroix. Sur la declaration de Miajenski, rappelle qu'il I'a 
confondu, que la Convention a ^t^ satisfaite, et qu'il n'a pas ^t^ 
accus^ pour cela. II dit : je fus envoy^ k Li^ge pour connattre 
des reproch.es faits a la Tresorerie, et vice-versk. !Nous ^tions 
trois. Jamais je n'ai vu Dumourier en presence de Dumourier 
(au lieu de Miacrinski ?). J'ai dit a Miajenski, sa legion man- 
quant de tout, que je appuyerais devant mes collegues, mais qu'il 
etait etonnant que sur le pays ennemi ou ne d^cretat pas que les 
troupes dtrangeres fussent payees. Je n'ai ni bu, ni mange avec 
Dumourier. Vu pendant six k sept jours toujours ensemble. 
DantoUj Gossuin et moi nous avions visits toutes les caisses de la 
Belgique pour examiner les faits. — Dumourier ne voulait point 
preter les mains au decret, je me levai et lui d^clarai que s'il ne 
signait pas a I'heure, nous le ferions garrotter, etc. II signa 
I'ordre a Eonsin. — La seconde fois nous nous rendimes k Bruxelles, 
Dumourier ^tait en Hollande. — Tous mes collegues ont attests que 
je preposai de me laisser aller auprfes de Dumourier I'observer et 
le tuer mes collegues ne f urent pas de cet avis. 

. . 1900 et 600 livres de linge achete par Brune en pre- 
sence des collegues, pour la table. II etait k bon marcb^. II dut 
etre cbarg^ sur les voitures que ramenaient en France les restitu- 
tions des eflfets pilles par les generaux, c'etait contenu dans une 
malle k mon addresse. Je I'ai declare alors au comite de Salut. 
Alors je I'ai reclam^e. Ne confondez pas la premiere voiture 
d'argenterie qui fut pill^, elle etait expddiee par tous nos 
collegues. 

Danton. J'avais d^fi^ publiquement d'entrer en explication 
sur I'imputation des 400,000. II results du procfes-verbal qu'il 
n'y a k moi que mes chiffons et un corset molleton. Le has, 
somm4 m'a donn6 communication. 

Appeie aux Jacobins par mes collogues, je declarais {sic) que 
le renouvellement 6tait contre-revolutionnaire : ce que portait (sic) 
les pouvoirs des envoy^s des soci^t^s populaires. — Billaud-Varennes 
m'appuya et je fus charge de faire la proposition le 1 1 k la Con- 



APPENDIX X 401 

vention. — Hubert, le lendemain, me d^nonga dans sa feuille ; et 
voila le principe de la calomnie. 

Je fus indigne, au 31 mai, de voir un officier qui disait : 11 
n'y a ni Marais, ni Montagne ; qui distribuait de I'argent au 
bataillon de Courbevoie ; je . . . t^moin Panis, Legendre, Robes- 
pierre, Pache, Robert-Lindet. Alors je montais (sic) h la tribune, 
etc. . . . que nous n'etions pas libres. Au Comite, devant Pache, 
le 2 juin, j'ai improuv^ la mesure maladroite de Hauriot. Nous 
I'avions pr^venu qu'en rentrant nous d^cr^terions les 32, mais que 
ce n'etait pas assez pour la chose publique, qu'il fallait purger la 
Convention, et a propose 500,000 livres pour I'arm^e de Paris que 
avait sauv6 la patrie. Bar^re s'y opposa. C'est Bar^re qui a 
propos^ le d^cret d'accusation contre Hauriot; c'est moi qui ai 
d^fendu Hauriot contre cela. Qu'on entende les temoins, la Con- 
vention a ^t^ tromp^e. 

— J'ai appel^ I'insurrection en demandant cinquante revolution- 
naires comma moi. La Convention m'appuya, I'avais dit trois 
mois avant, il n'y a plus de paix avec les Girondins, ai-je la face 
Hypocrite ? 

Hanriot crut que j'etais oppos^ h I'insurrection et alors je lui 
dis : vas toujours ton train, n'aie pas peur, nous voulon constater 
que I'Assembl^e est libre. 

— Je n'ai jamais bu ni mang^ avec Mirande, et je proposal k mes 
collogues de I'arreter, il s'y opposerent. 

Je pris la main k Hanriot et lui dis : tiens bon. 

Herault. C'est moi qui ai d^couvert I'ordre sign^ au crayon 
par Hauriot pour laisser passer la Convention, ainsi, etc. 

Philippeaux. Arriv^ de mon d^pt j'ignorais les intrigues, je 
fus trompe par Roland. Je me suis r^tract^ k temps. — Lorsque je 
m'apergus du pi^ge tendu dans I'appel au peuple, je montai a la 
tribune et j'abjurai et votai de suite comme la Montagne. J'ai 
votd pour Marat (c'est faux, il n'a vot^ ni pour ni contre). Le 
Comit^ ne r^pondant point k mes lettres, je suis venu ici. Le 
Comity ne m'a point entendu. Alors, pour remplir mon devoir, 
j'ai ^crit k la Convention, et I'^v^nement, sur Hubert, a prouv^, 
etc. On a fait contre moi des adresses contre moi (sic) etc. On 
a envoy^ de chez moi trois commissaires pour connaitre let faits et 
Levasseur les a fait arreter. 

Vesterman. Lorsque Dumouriez etait en Belgique j'etais au 

2 C 



402 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Hollande. Abandonn^ entre les ennemis, vivant de pillage, je 
suis arriv^ a Envers {sic) avec ma legion. Le regiment de cavalrie 
fut attaqu6. Je repoussai rennemi. 

Accus6 de venir deux et trois fois apporter les d^peches de 
Dumourier k Gensonn^. 

L'arm^e manquait de souliers, je fus envoy^ par Dumourier au 
Conseil, et je les rapportai a I'arm^e. 

Dumourier lui montra la lettre de roi de Prusse pour son 
secretaire, qu'il avait renvoy^, je courus aprfes lui et I'arretai de 
mon pouvoir. Le second voyage pour porter le pli des articles 
arrets {sic) entre les g^n^raux. 

II a' encore 6t6 envoye en otage a Mons, lors de I'evacuation. — 
Troisi^me voyage pour amener Malus et d'Espagnac, et porta un 
pacquet; (szc) au president du comity diplomatique. — J'ai denonc^ 
au {sic) Jacobins, au Comit^ le fils naturel de Proly, et on me rit 
au nez. II engagea au dejeune {sic) pour retablien Dumourier 
aux Jacobins. Pourquoi ne m'a-t-on pas appel^ lors de la deposi- 
tion de Miajenski? J'etais ici, mand^ a la barre. Dumourier 
m'a toujours ^loign^ de lui. A proteste sur la capitulation 
d'Anvers. Sur le fait de Lille. 

Avant d'arriver a Menhem Proly me denonca. Ici, on me 
mis {sic) hors de la loi et un officier prussien me montra la feuille 
de la Convention et m'engagea h. rester, qu'on me payerait, et 
chercha k m'effrayer en disant que les autres gen^raux avaient ete 
massacres. Yoir au comite militaire. Je fus k Lille avec ma 
troupe. Je trouvai Mouton et vint {sic) prendre son ordre pour 
venir k la barre. — J'ai prete serment avant, a Douai. Le d^cret 
du 4 mai dit qu'il n'y avait lieu k m' accuser. J'etais d^nonc^ aux 
comit^s, je ne connais point Talma. 

Danton. C'est Barere qui est patriote k present et Danton 
aristocrate. La France ne croira pas cela longtemps. 

Danton, dans la chambre des accuses. — Moi conspirateur 1 
Mon nom est accot^ de toutes les institutions rdvolutionnaires : 
lev^e, arm^e r^v., comit^ r^v., comity de salut public, tribunal 
r^volutionnaire, C'est moi qui me suis donn^ la mort, enfin, et je 
suis un mod^re ! 

[Topino-Lebrun left no notes of the following day, tlie 
1 6 Germinal.] 



XI 

REPORT OF THE FIRST COMMITTEE OF 
PUBLIC SAFETY 

TREATING OF THE GENERAL CONDITION OF 
THE REPUBLIC, AND READ BY BARRERE TO 
THE CONVENTION ON WEDNESDAY, MAY 29, 

1793 

This report is the most important appendix not only to this book, 
but to any description of the two days that expelled the Girondins. 
It is here published for the first time, and, though of some length, 
will well repay the reading for any student of the Revolution. 

I have dwelt sufficiently on its importance in the text, and I 
can dismiss it here with a short introduction. 

It is the first great result of the Committee which Danton had 
helped to create, and of which he was the soul. It is the first step 
taken by this new organ of government towards that dictatorship 
to exercise which it had been called into existence. The enormous 
amount of detailed work necessary to produce it shows us the 
number of agents which the Committee must have possessed, and 
their activity, as well as the industry of the members themselves, 
for it had been at work but eight weeks. 

Danton undoubtedly inspired the tone and direction of the 
report, but the somewhat florid style is Barrfere's own. Dr. 
Robinet thinks, however, that the last pages, from the section on 
Public Instruction onwards, are in Danton's manner, and M. 
Bernard would even put it at the section on the Colonies, two 
pages earlier. Even if this is the case, some sentences at least 
were put in by Barr^re, for they betray his inimitable verbiage, to 
which Danton was a stranger. 

Of the important part the report played in the complicated 



404 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

history of the week May 26-June 3, 1793, enough has been said in 
the text; it is only necessary to add here that no speech or memoir 
contains such an indictment of the Girondin misgovernment as is 
given indirectly by this list of ascertained facts in the condition 
of France. 

The reading of the report is mentioned in the Moniteur of May 
31, but, contrary to their custom, they did not print it on account 
of its great length. It seems to have been read in the afternoon 
from about two to four, just before Cambon's motion was put to 
the vote. I give the more important passages, about half the full 
length of the document. 



CONVENTION NATIONALS 

RAPPORT G^N^RAL 

SUR 

L':^TAT DE LA R]&PUBLIQUE FRANgAISE 

Faity au nom du Comite de Salut Public^ dans la seance du 
mercredi 29 maiy Pan second de la Republique: 

Par Barrere^ 

Depute du departement des Hautes- Pyrenees 
Impr'tme par ordre de la Convention Nationale 

CiTOYENS, — Charges par lea representans du peuple de leur parler 
aujourd'hui des grands inter§ts qui les rassemblent, et des moyens que 
nous avons employes depuis deux mois pour le salut de la patrie en 
peril ; nous reclamons d'abord de votre justice de remonter par la 
pensee, ^ I'epoque de notre nomination, et de vous rappeler en quel 
etat se trouvaient alors la Republique et toute les parties d'administra- 
tion nationale. 

Quoiqu'accables par la tacbe perilleuse et grande que vous nous avez 
imposee, nous avons dA obeir. Votre confiance, notre zfele et I'amour 
de notre pays ont dii nous tenir lieu de facultes. 

Au-dehors se presentait une guerre terrible 4 soutenir sur des f ron- 
tieres d'une etendue immense et sur des cotes indefendues. Audedans, 
se propageaient des dissensions civiles, portant avec elles les deux 
caracteres les phis funestes, le fanatisme royal et religieux, secouru par 
des perfidies multipliees dans I'interieur, et par des intelligences com- 
binees audebors. 

What follows is a general indictment of the results of 
Girondin rule, with special and particular attacks on the 
Ministry of War and on their fear of responsibility. 

On voyait dans toutes nos armees des besoins imperieux et sans 
fesse renaiasana ; des secours nuls ou tardifs \ des approvisionnemena 

40s 



4o6 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

insuffisans ou de maiivaise qualite et des administrations devorantes, 
dont quelques-unes, n'ont d'autre but reel que d'agrandir la fortune de 
beaucoup d'agioteurs et de quelques capitalistes. Dans nos ports des 
travaux ralentis et une inertie coupable ; partout des trabisons ourdies 
et des coalitions pr^parees ; des etats-majors h refaire ou k epurer ; des 
armees a organiser ou a improviser ; des fonctionnaires civils et mili- 
taires k surveiller ou k remplacer ; des forces a creer sur tous les points 
menaces par les troubles ; des armes k fabriquer ; des canons k fondre ; 
la marine k creer ; I'esprit public a remonter avec energie ; I'anarchie k 
attaquer ; la discipline k retablir ; des mouvemens contra-revolution- 
naires k comprimer et un cabos d'interets, de plaintes, de passions, 
d'abus, de pretentions et de prejuges k debrouiller, au milieu d'une 
coiTespondance journaliere et centuplee par ces circonstances actuelles. 
Quel vast g6nie ou quel courage inepuisable il eut fallu pour repondre 
tout k coup k des circonstances aussi extraordinaires ou pour dominer 
des evenemens aussi imprevus ? Nous avons borne notre tache k par- 
courir d'abord toutes les parties du gouvernement provisoire, et k nous 
frayer ensuite une route au milieu de cet assemblage enorme de forces 
et de resistances, de bons et de mauvais principes. 

Le premier obstacle qui s'est present^ k nous, est venu du changement 
dans le ministere de la guerre, que avait precede notre etablissement. 

Le second obstacle etait dans le ministere de la marine n^glig^, 
aneanti m§me, par un serie de ministries royaux, et dont nous avons ete 
forces de faire cbanger le clief et plusieurs adjoints. 

L^ s'est rompue, pour nous, la chaine des operations de ces deux 
departemens, les plus importans dans un temps de guerre de terre et de 
iner ; et nous nous sommes vus prives, tout k coup, de toutes les ressour- 
ces de I'experience. Nous n'avons pu recueillir, dans I'agglom^ration 
des affaires de cette partie de I'administration publique, que des etata 
inexacts ou des lumieres incertaines. 

Un apergu des deliberations du conseil executif nous a montre, d'un 
cot^, des travaux incoh^rens qui n'ont pu avoir aucune espece de succ^s 
h cause des evenemens qui les dominaient ; de I'autre^ des negligences 
funestes et des fautes graves que les evenemens suivants ont mieux fait 
sentir. Depuis les boucbes de I'Escaut, ouvertes par un usurpation de 
la puissance souveraine, jusqu'aux extremit6s de la Mediterranee, qui 
ont ete le theatre de nos revers, et de la versatilite niinisterielle, nous 
n'avons vu ni cette suite d'opdrations qui assurent les succes, ne cette 
prevoyance des mesures qui diminuent les revers. Point d'ensemble, 
point de conceptions vastes, point de vues bardies, point de plan arr§t6 
point d'energie, et partout la terreur de la responsabilite, marcbant en 
avant du ministere, tandis qu'il s'agit de marcher fierement k la liberty, 
sans regarder en arriere. 

Au mois d'octobre, la resistance k I'ennemi avait donn^ des concep- 
tions et des forces au conseil executif. 



APPENDIX XI 407 

Les succfes du mois de novembre ont amoUi le conseil. Jemmappes 
a it6 pour les ministres (sic) la Capouequi a detruit son 6nergie et 
att^nue ses travaux. 

Le d^partement de I'interieur, macliine trop lourde, trop compliquee 
pour un homme, quand il serait plein de talens et de moyens d'execu- 
tion, avait refroidi pendant longtemps I'esprit public et engourdi les 
corps administratifs. II etait impossible que la main d'un seul homme 
piit remuer cette machine ^norme surchargee de details, d'une adminis- 
tration immense, d'op^rations mercantiles dont le succfes est douteux, 
dont le resultat exige de grands sacrifices, et dont le secret appelle la 
defiance. La seule ressource que ce ministere disproportionne pouvait 
trouver, ^tait dans les administrateurs d^partementaires, dont la plu- 
part, insoucians sur les travaux qui leur sont confies, negligent de 

correspondre, ou dont la conduite exageree et sans mesure leur faisait 
meconnaitre toute subordination. 

Le departement de la guerre, dans lequel cbaque ministre a porte ses 
prejuges et ses assertions, ses routines et ses baines ; le ministfere de la 
guerre desorganise sans cesse par la frequents mutation de ses agens et 
par la diversite de leurs principes ou de leurs opinions, presentait et 
present encore un cabos inextricable, des abus sans nombre, et une im- 
puissance r6elle dans tout homme que ne serait pas ne tres actif dans 
la mani^re d'ordonner et entreprenant sur tons les moyens de defense. 

In what follows note the hand of Danton, almost his 
phraseology in the second paragraph. 

Le ministere des affaires etrangferes, convert d'obscuritds politiques, 
ne pouvant avoir au milieu des defiances produites par la revolution et 
des mouvemens irreguliers de la guerre, ni fixite dans les operations, ni 
vues suivies, ni projets determines, ni secrets dans les plans, a saisi 
seulement le fil de quelques affaires importantes, et redonne maintenanb 
de I'activitie aux moyens nombreux dont I'interet de plusieurs gouverne- 
mens prepare le succes. 

C'est de I'audace dans les conceptions politiques, c'est de I'ensemble 
dans les mesures, c'est de la promptitude dans les moyens d'execution, 
que depend la diplomatic nouvelle d'un peuple qui nait h la liberty. 

Again, a direct attack on the Girondins, especially in 
the characteristic phrase, " the paralysis of honesty." 

Le ministfere de la marine enray6 longtemps dans les operations par 
une probite paralytique, et par des sous-ordres inexperimentes ou sus- 
pects, n'ayant donne ni protection au commerce, ni defense pour nos 
cotes, ni moyens au succes de la course, ni activite aux grand armemens 
dans nos ports, ni approvisionnemens suivis pour les flottes, reprend 



4o8 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

sous un ministre nouveau son activite, nous promet une defense et une 
marine. . . . 

Here again is a half-concession to the Girondins, wHch 
was part of the poHcy I have spoken of in the text. 

Le conseil exdcutif en sent lui-meme la necessite : et nous lui devons 
la justice de dire, que ne se dissimulant pas cette caducite politique, 
amenee par les circonstances, par des denonciations muitipliees, et par 
la presqu'impossibilite de tenir regulierement le gouvernail au milieu 
de la tempgte ; le conseil ex^cutif d(^sire et soUicite le renouvellement 
du miniature. . . . 

DE L'ETAT MILITAIRE. 

Presses entre la n^cessit6 de pourvoir sans delai aux besoins dea 
armies, et I'impossibilit^ d'approfondir en si peu de temps des plans 
g^ndraux, nous avous rechercbe d'abord des armes. . . . 

Des arretes du comity ont ordonne I'envoi des commissaires pour 
d^nombrer subitement les armes et les canons qui se trouvaient dans 
les fabriques et les manufactures nationales, et pour les faire transporter 
aux armees et dans les departemens les plus denues de ce genre de 
secours. Saint-Etienne, Ruel, Mont-C6nis, Indret, Toulouse, Lyon, 
Charleville, Sedan, Maubeuge, ont regu des ordres pressants sur set 
objet. , . . 

Divers arretes ont ordonn^ le transport de vieilles armes qui se 
trouvent dans diverses fabriques ou arsenaux, pour les faire raccomoder 
dans les diverses villes dont la population offrait des ouvriers, et surtout 
dans les departemens limotropbes des pays r6volt6s. , . . 

Les ministres et les assemblees nationales ont mis trop peu d'im- 
portance k la manufacture de Saint-Etienne, depuis le commencement 
de la revolution. 

Les ouvriers briilaient du desir de travailler pour la r^publique, 
mais le px'ix de I'arme ayant toujours ^te fixe au-dessous des d^boursds 
du fabricant, ils ont travaille pour les corps administratifs, dont la con- 
currence a augmente la valeur. Le fer et le salarie de I'ouvrier sont 
augmentes de prix. 

Des commissaires du pouvoir executif viennent de requerir tons les 
fabricans de porter h la commission de verification, toutes les armes qui 
sont en leur pouvoir, pour etre expedier pour Bayonne, Perpignan, et 
Tours. Les livraisons se font chaque jour. 

Les commissaires s'occupent de redonner la plus grande activity ^ 
la manufacture d'armes de Saint-Etienne, qui secondee par le patriotisme 
des ouvriers et de la municipalite, portera la fabrication a quatre ou 
cinq cents fusils ou pistolets par jour. 

II y a ^ Tulle un grand nombre d'armes k reparer, le comite en a 



APPENDIX XI 409 

fait distribuer h plusieurs departemens meridionaux ; le ministre de la 
marine donne de I'activite a la manufacture de Tulle, pour armer nos 
marins. Dans ce moment, le commissaire Bouillet, envoye par le con- 
seil executif, est a Tulle, pour accelerer la fabrication des armes nec6s- 
saires k la marine, et pour connaitre I'etat des vieilles armes qu'on a 
entass^B dans ce depot. . . . 

The foUowing passages indicate the motives of what 
was to be the Terror, a system based, of course, upon the 
necessity for commissariat. 



VIVEES. 

Les vivres sent aussi n^cessaires que les armes ; on se plaint dans 
quelques armees organisees trop lentement, ou improvisees trop k la 
hg,te, pour que tout ce qui leur etait n^cessaire Mt prepare, et ces 
plaintes sont justes ; nous accelerons I'approvisionnement des armies, 
autant qu'il est en nous, par le ministre et les administrations qui en 
dependent. La latitude des pouvoirs donnes k vos comites, pent sup- 
pleer la faiblesse du ministere de la guerre I'insuffisance de ses agens, 
et la malveillance ou la torpeur de ses regies. II est cependant des 
obstacles eprouv^s par les regisseurs et par leurs agens, a cause des 
craintes propagees sur le manque de subsistances, et le comite s'est 
occup6 de faire cesser ces obstacles. 

L'administration cbargee de I'approvisionnement des places de 
guerre a present^ au comite des etats de situation rassurante sur I'ap- 
provisionnement des places les plus menacees : il jui a montrd les 
dispositions generales prises pour les fournitures de subsistances dans 
toutes les divisions. II en resulte que les evenemens imprevus de la 
Belgique, en ramenant subitement I'ennemi sur nos frontiferes, ont 
contrarie des calculs et nous ont priv^ des approvisionnements faits 
d'apres un autre systeme ; mais le comite presse les directeurs de 
pourvoir aux approvisionnements, et avertit sans cesse le ministre des 
autres besoins des armees, k mesure que ces besoins se demontrent 
ou que les plaintes nous parviennent. Un changement dans cette 
administration, dont vous nous avez renvoy^ I'examen, merite toute 
notre soUicitude, et se trouve etre la suite inevitable des change- 
ments perpetuels dans le ministere de la guerre ; cbangement qui 
entraine celui de ses principes et de ses moyens.^ 

1 Ce qu'il y a de certain d'apres le resultat donne par la commission des sub. 
sistances militaires, c'est que les armies sont approvisionn^es jusque vers le 
premier octobre ; I'arm^e d'ltalie, la plus mal approvisionnee, a des subsist- 
ances pour quelques mois, et Ton a dej^ prepare pour elle d'autres appro- 
visionnmetits. 



4IO THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Le partie de I'liabillement et de I'^quipement, qui a coAtS tant de 
tresors k la nation, a ete mal fournie, mal administrde, et pill^e dans la 
Belgique avec autant d'impudeur que de trahison. 

Les fournisseurs, plus avares que patriotes, out distribu^ h. toutes les 
armees des etoffes de mauvaise qualitd. Un force de prodigalite nationale 
payait les habits k I'avarice agioteuse qui les fournissait, et le soldat, 
au milieu des fatigues et des perils de la guerre, 6tait sans habits ou en 
portrait qui n'etaient pas de long usage. 

Ces jours derniers il a defile devant vous un detachement de braves 
soldats du regiment ci-devant Conti, qui allait vers les departemens 
rdvoltes. On n'aurait pas present^ au plus petit prince d'Allemagne, 
ou au plus pauvre de I'ltalie, des troupes aussi mal vetues ; elles ont 
paru devant les repr^sentans d'une nation qni depense pour la guerre, 
chaque mois, plus de millions que plusieurs rois de I'Europe n'ont de 
revenu dans un an. . . . 

L'arm^e des Ardennes, reunie k celle du Nord, se forme sous les 
regards de commissaires actifs, et les recrues j abondent k un point 
que votre comit^ a cru devoir les faire refluer vers I'armee du Nord. 

The next allusion is interesting as showing us the 
appreciation of what was to be the reinforcement of the 
army of Sambre-et-Meuse. 

L'armde de la Moselle a pris des positions avantageuses, R6unie h, 
celle du Rhin, elles annoncent que Mayence pourra devenir le tombeau 
des hordes prussiennes. L'esprit est bon dans cette arm^e, distingude 
par la discipline, et les recrues s'y encadrent tons les jours. 

On s'occupe a faire camper et exercer I'arm^e des Alpes, dont le 
recrutement est entierement effectu^. On fortifie tous les points de 
defense, et on augment^ la garnison des places. Les recrues nombreuses 
qui y sont arrivees ont fourni un excMant de vingt-un mille hommes ; 
vous avez diaposd de huit mille contre les departemens revolt^s. Les 
treize mille restans renforceront I'armee d'ltalie, diminu^e pour servir 
k la defense de la Corse, formeront une reserve ou renforceront I'armee 
des Pyrenees orientales. 

Le ddpartement du Mont-Blanc s'est empress^ d'organiser plusieurs 
bataillons et de prouver ainsi son attachement k la Republique ; ils 
reclament des armes, et nous esperons qu'avec des moyens mis dej^ en 
activity ila seront bient6t arm^s. 

La revolte de Thonnes est apprais^e et les coupables juges. C'etait 
la miche d'une mine preparee sous le Mont- Blanc, et dont I'explosion 
^tait combin^e avec la prochaine attaque des Pidmontais et des 
Autrichiens. 

L'armee d'ltalie se prepare a d6fendre ce que la valeur et la liberty 
ont conquis k Nice. Mais des agitateurs y ont caus4 de la fermentation, 



APPENDIX XI 411 

comme dans I'armde des Alpes ; ils y tenaient des propos injurieux k la 
Convention nationale ; ils y parlaient de royaut^, et se servaient dn 
moyen de la paye en assignats pour alterer le bon esprit des troupes ; 
des alarmes ont 6t^ jett6es sur les subsiatances, dent le comity s'occupe 
dans ce moment. 

Le general de I'armee d'ltalie a pris les moyens propres a d^couvrir 
les agitateurs et k les faire conduire au tribunal extraordinaire. 

L'arm^e des Pyrenees a ete la plus neglig4 et la plus mal pourvue 
en armes et en munitions, et c'est contre les troupes les plus feroces et 
les plus fanatiques qu'elles doivent defendre les plus belles contrdes de 
la Rdpublique. 

Aussi nous sommes accables tous les jours par des relations mal- 
heureuses qui ne sont que el triste resultat de la negligence de deux 
anciens ministres de la guerre qui n'ont jamais su penser qu'il existat 
une armee des Pyrenees. . . . 

The -wliole of the above is an interesting example of the 
detailed methods of the Committee, with its reiteration 
against the Girondin management of the war. It continues 
in much the same spirit. 

Du cotd de I'Ocean, la trahison de quelque cbef des Miquelets et la 
Mchetd d'une partie du regiment vingtieme ont livrd un point de la 
frontifere. Une terreur panique produite par le mot de trahison et 
par des malveillans semds dans les petits camps formes sur I'extreme 
frontiere, a desorganis6 le peu de force qui y etaient arrivdes, a de- 
courage ceux qui y accouraient et force d'abandonner Andaye et tout 
le pays qui se trouve entre la rivifere de Nivelle et la frontiere pour ne 
former qu'un seul camp k Bidarre. 

La discipline k retablir, le courage k relever, 6taient les premiers 
besoins de cette armee. 

Nos commissaires se sont vus forces d'dtablir provisoirement un 
reglement severe de discipline. lis nous disent que I'ennemi abat 
partout I'arbre de la liberte, fait les incursions sur les maisons des 
patriotes dans la partie fran§aise abandonnde ; mais les babitans des 
campagnes ont le couragede ne pas obeir aux requisitions du general 
espagnol. 

11 jjarait qu'il n'est fort que de notre faiblesse, et que si des secours 
d'armes et d'artillerie sont portds k nos freres, notre territoire sera 
bientot 6vacu6. Le commandement de Bayonne est confie au patriote 
Courpon, et la citadelle de Saint-Esprit est d(^fendue par des republi- 
cains. Vingt canons et quatre compagnies des canonniers de Paris y 
ont dte envoy es en poste, et doivent avoir secouru cette frontiere le 14 
de ce mois ; le camp de Bidarre se forme avec succes. 

La division, de I'armee des Pyrenees en deux grands parties, nous 



412 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

donnera plus de force pour une defense active au besoin : la terre y 
produit des bataillons d'hommes libres ; nous leur devons des secoura 
abondans, car ils ont 6te oublies jusqu'i present. On etit dit, en voyant 
I'etat de ces frontieres, que le complot etait pr§t, que la force devait 
envahir le Nord, tandis que la perfidie et I'indef ense livreraient le Midi. 
Mais I'intrepidite et I'entbousiasme des Meridionaux pour la liberty, 
est un obstacle invincible au succfes des negligences ministerielles, des 
trahisons interieures, et des succfes que le perfide Pitt a promise k 
I'Espagne. Le camp se forme devant Bayonne et il a repris du terrain 
du cote d'Andaye ; I'arm^e reprend I'attitude qui convient k des 
phalanges r^publicaines, et I'artillerie commence a y arriver avec dea 
provisions. 

L'aflfaire de la Vendee n'a etd envisag^e trop longtemps que comme 
une affaire de police, ou une querelle elevee dans un coin d'un departe- 
ment. 

There follows a furtlier indictment based upon a special 
case. 

L'arm^e des c6tes n'a jamais existe ; I'etat-major n'avait pas m^me 
6te forme ; quelques cbefs militaires avaient ete envoy es avec de faiblea 
moyens et de simples requisitions. On avait donne des ordres pour 
que des cadres y fussent transportes ; ils ont ete arrSt^s dans leur 
marcbe par la crainte ou I'impuissance momentan^e que nous avait 
donne la trabison de Dumouriez. Des recrues y ont ete rassemblees, 
sans y trouver ni cadres, ni armes, ni un nombre suffisant d'officiers 
gen^raux. . . . 

Voili I'etat ou se tronvaient les armdes au lo mai, dpoque k laquelle 
le comitd a demande inutilement la parole. . . . 

Then a summary, the detail of which is well worth 
following. 

VOICI LE DERNIER i^TAT. 

II arrive des troupes h Bayonne ainsi que des canons, Le camp qui 
dtait a Bidard entre Bayonne et Saint-Jean de Luz a 4td porte, depuis 
vendredi, entre Saint-Jean de Luz et Andaye, 

L'armee des Pyrenees orientales qu'on esperait, au moyen des recrute- 
mens, mettre en etat de contenir au moins I'Espagnol, a essuy6 presque 
consecutivement deux tehees qui compromettent la stiretd de cette 
partie de la fronti^re. Cette defaite n'est due qu'4 la gendarmerie 
nationale ; mais un exemple prompt et severe mettra un terme k cette 
ISchete ou k cette trabison, 

Aux Alpes nous venons d'etre menaces d'une attaque tres procbaine 
execut^e par dea forces trea considerables, surtout dans la partie du 



APPENDIX XI 413 

Var, debouche par lequel I'eiineini peut menacer aussi Marseille et 
Toulon. Le comity de salut public a d<i prendre la seule mesure qui 
etait en son pouvoir ; il a ordonne au general Kellerman, le seul qui 
eiit une connaissance suflBisante des points de defense et de nos moyens 
militaires dans cette partie, de s'y rendre avec la plus grande diligence, 
afin de prevenir, s'il est possible, les malheurs que le moindre retard 
pourrait amener. Le g^n^ral de I'armee d'ltalie a paru craindre que la 
cour de Naples ne vienne renforcer la coalition dans le midi. Mais le 
ministre des affaires etrangferes vient de communiquer des depletes qui 
detruisent ces nouvelles. 

Kellerman s'est fait preceder par un courrier extraordinaire qui a 
portd h ses lieutenans les ordres preparatoires des operations auxquellea 
I'ennemi peut le forcer. Ce general, investi de votre confiance et de 
celle des troupes, ne pouvait 6tre remplace. On vous avait annonce 
d'abord qu'il se rendrait dans la Vendee ; mois les avantages remportes 
un instant sur les revoltes, et la certitude de la procbaine arrivee de 
Biron dans les d^partemens revoltes, ont du faire cbanger la premiere 
destination de Kellerman. L'armee d'ltalie a des subsistances assureea 
pour quelque temps. On a pris des mesures pour la mettre a I'abri de 
la disette. 

Au Ehin, une action qui n'a servi qu'a la destruction des liommes, 
sans avancer les affaires d'aucun parti, y laisse les choses h peu pres 
dans la meme situation qu'auparavant, avec cette difference, que le 
changement de general qui a et6 en partie force, peut influer sur nos 
succes. II est bon d'observer que nos armees dans cette partie se trou- 
vent avoir en tete des forces les plus manoeuvrieres, et commandoes par 
les gdneraux les plus accredites de I'Europe. 

Nos generaux, au contraire, portes au commandement pour la 
premiere fois, ne peuvent avoir la m§me habitude et les memes avan- 
tages que ceux auxquels les grands mouvemens de guerre sont familiers. 
Les approvisionnemens dans cette partie et les subsistances sont bien 
assures. 

Dans le Nord, notre situation est tres alarmante, et la Convention 
doit connaitre tons ces maux ; elle a besoin d'etre instruite par le mal- 
heur, et de sentir les tristes eflfets de ses divisions. 

Notre armee, repoussee entre Combrai et Boucbain, quittant son 
camp de Famars pour prendre plus loin celui de Coefar, abandonnant 
k leurs propres forces Conde et Valenciennes, perdant ses communica- 
tions avec Douay et Lille d'un cote, et de I'autre avec Maubeuge el le 
Quesnoy, est exposee a de nouveaux revers, si la presence du general 
Custine, qui a dl y arriver le 25, ne lui rend pas la discipline qui lui 
manque et la confiance sans laquelle il n'est point des uccfes k obtenir 
dans la guerre. 

Si les efforts de ce g6ndral ne sont pas promptement secondOs par 
I'union des representans du peuple, la Convention doit s'attendre k 



414 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

tomber dans une situation plus embarrassante qu'au moment oh, pen- 
dant la dernifere campagne, les esclaves allemands entraient en Cham- 
pagne, et menagaient Paris et la liberte. Alors d'heureux hasards, ou 
plutot cette destinee qui semble conduire la France, ont disparaltre des 
dangers aussi imminens ; mais doit-on compter sur une nouvelle faveur 
de I'aveugle fortune ? ne devons-nous pas craindre une nouvelle in- 
vasion, et pouvons-nous nous flatter quetoutes nos villes imiteront le 
genereux devouement de celle de Maubeuge, qui nous ecrit le 26 de ce 
mois : — " Ici on bat la gen6rale dans cet instant : on a envoy^ une 
partie de notre garnison dans la Vendee ; nous restons ; nous dejouerons 
nos ennemis exterieurs et interieurs, ou nous mourrons libres. La ville 
sautera si nos murs abattus permettent a I'ennemi de souiller notre 
enceinte." 

Quant aux besoins de cette armee du Nord, peut-etre croira-t-on 
diificilement que, malgre toutes nos depenses, la demande qui vient 
d'etre faite au comity, qui a ^te arretee par le commissaire g^n^ral de 
I'armee du Nord, et visee par les commissaires de la Convention, monte 
k la somme de 49 millions. 

L'armde qui doit aneantir les revolt^s s'organise ; il arrive un grand 
nombre de bataillons k Tours ; les postes de la rive droite de la Loire 
Be renforcent, et I'on fait defiler des troupes en poste. Si les rebelles 
menagent cette rive, ils sont bors d'etat d'executer ce project ; leurs 
forces ce divisent, mais ils rentrent dans les pays converts. Les princi- 
paux cbefs des revoltes sont subordonnes aux pretres ; c'est une veri- 
table croisade ; mais les babitans des campagnes commencent a se lasser 
de cette borrible guerre, et murmurent. 

D'un autre cote, on nous ecrit qu'il est parti, depuis notre dernier 
Bucces, un courier de Bruxelles k Londres, pour engager le cabinet de 
Saint-James k accelerer un armament tendant k porter sur les c6tes de 
Bretagne des troupes, des armes, des munitions, et a vomir sur nos 
rivages un corps considerable d'emigres de Jersey et Guernsey. 

Le transfuge Conde a envoye a Jersey tons les emigres bretons pour 
Stre deposes sur nos cotes et y seconder un des rejetons de la famille de 
nos tyrans. 

On se plaignait presque partout des commissaires des guerres ce 
corps essentiel des armees va etre change, am^liore sur de nouvelles 
bases et epure par des cboix patriotiques. 

Quant k la suppression de la pale en numeraire, toutes les armees 
de la Republique I'ont regue sans peine ; ils sacrifient a cbaque instant 
leur vie a la liberte, comment s'occuperaient-il d'interSts p^cuniaires ? 
mais aussi ils ont droit k plus de surveillance pour les approvisione- 
mens et pour les subsistances. Quelques compagnies de I'armee d'Ttalie 
seulement ont montr6 de la resistance ; mais les agitateurs seront 
dejou^s par la surveillance qui y a ^t6 etablie, et par les soins de vos 
commissaires. 



APPENDIX XI 415 

Dans le choix des officieurs gendraux, nous avons dH quelquefois 
ob6ir aux defiances populaires et aux d^nonciations individuelles ; 
mais c'est Ik un des maux attaches a la revolution, qui use beaucoup 
d'hommes, qui en eloigne un plus grand nombre, et qui pr^sente plus 
d'accusations que de ressources. Sans doute apr^s les odieuses trabisons 
qui ont aflflige et qui aflBiigent encore la republique et desorganise deux 
fois les armees, on pent, on doit meme devenir defiant et soupgonneux ; 
mais la ligne qui sdpare la defiance et la calomnie, est trop facile k de- 
passer ; est si la d^nonciation juste est une action civique, I'accusation 
interessee est la honte de nos mceurs et la ressource de la baine. . . 

Le comite, pour ne rien negliger dans cette terrible partie de la 
guerre, a interrog^ des militaires instruits ; il s'est environne de leur 
experience pour faire un plan de guerre auquel se rattacberaient des 
plans de campagne pour cbacune des armies. Jusqu'4 present la 
guerre de la liberte a ete faite sans plans, sans suite, sans prevoyance 
m^me ; il est plus que temps de tracer les limites dans les lesquelles la 
guerre sera soutenue, dans quelle partie elle sera defensive, dans quelle 
autre elle sera offensive assigner h. cbaque armee la portion de f rontieres 
qu'elle a k defendre, les points des ennemis qu'elle doit attaquer ou 
couvrir. 

In wliat foUows regarding the Navy, we see the attempt 
of the Committee, which we know was foredoomed to 
failure, but which was a fine one, to meet the EngHsh 
Power. The " error," as English critics have called it, of 
rapidly putting in new officers was an unfortunate necessity. 

DE LA MARINE. 

Ici nous devons accuser ce systfeme perfide de Bertrand et de se3 
Bemblables, qui, depuis plusieurs ann^es, semblait preparer, de concert 
avec I'Angleterre, I'abaissement de la France, et assurer k nos plus 
constans ennemis I'empire des mers. . . . C'est par la reunion des forces 
navales, que nos ennemis ont eapere d'attaquer plus siirement notre 
independance, et de nous dieter de lois. Quoique par cette coalition 
Ton ait tentd aveuglement de faire passer la balance du pouvoir a une 
nation maritime, dej^ trop puissante pour I'interet du continent ; . . . 
quoique, par la desorganisation passagere de notre marine, par le 
denuement de nos ports, par le ralentissement des travaux, on ait 
esp^re de changer la destin6e de la republique francaise, ne craignons 
pas que I'on parvienne k faire retrograder la plus belle des revolutions. 

La surveillance constante du comity, le zfele du ministre, et le 
devouement de I'armee navale qui se forme, feront oublier tant de 
trahisons ou d ne^gligences, mais les moyen ne peuvent Stre que lents. 



4i6 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Des expeditions hardies, et confines a des hommes courageux sont 
preparees ; les plain tes du commerce ont ete enfin entendues d'apres 
le dernier rapport du ministre, le cabotage va etre protege dans I'Ocean 
par 34 canonnieres, 12 corvettes, 18 lougres, cutters ou avisos, et dans 
la M^diterranee, par 18 corvettes, ou cannonieres et 5 avisos, inde- 
pendamment des fregates dont 11 est inutile de faire connaltre le 
nombre et les stations, sans trabir les interets de la defense de la 
republique. . . . 

II existe beaucoup d'officers capables ; I'abaissement desvains pre- 
juges qui separaient I'armee commerciale de I'armee navale, nous assure 
des ressources, mais il faut les surveiller et punir sevferement la dds- 
obeissance ou la malversation ; avant de clioisir les officiers, examen et 
impartialite ; apres le choix, confiance entiere, mais responsabilite im- 
p^rieuse. Le secret accompagnera nos operations, si les inquietudes du 
commergant ou les soupgons du zele patriotique ne viennent pas les 
alterer ou les contrarier ; les corps civils ne doivent pas s'immiscer dans 
le secret des eperations navales, ou bien nos ennemis le sauront bientot, 
et nous vaincrons sans nous laisser sortir de nos ports. 

Le comite s'occupe des lois repressives que la discipline navale 
reclame avec plus d'interet que jamais. Une grande force s'organise 
dans les ports de la Mediterranee, qui par notre position, doit §tre le 
canal de navigation du commerce frangais. , . . 

On s'occupe des moyens les plus propres k retirer les colonies de 
I'etat malheureux oh. elles se trouvent, depuis qu'une cour perfide 
voulait faire la contre-revolution en France, par les malheurs de 
I'Amerique ; et si, k cote de nous, des Franqais veulent se rappeler 
qu'ila descendant de Guillaume, tons les calculs de la politique insu- 
laire pourront ^tre deranges. 

Le comite ne pent vous offrir aucun resultat preci» et detaille dana 
ce moment ; il serait mSme impolitique de la publier. Mais tout se 
prepare, et quique les forces de la republique soient tres inferieures a 
celles des ennemis coalises, le patriotisme les dirigera de manifere a 
rappeler le courage des filibustiers, et les exploits des Bart et des Dugay- 
Trouin. . , . 

In foreign affiairs we have the Dantonesque idea of 
pitting the Powers against one another, which, unfortu- 
nately for France, fanatics who were in power later aban- 
doned. The remark on the impolitic nature of the decree 
of the 19th of December should be specially noted: it 
comes direct from Danton. 



APPENDIX XI 417 



DES AFFAIRES fiTRANG^RES. 

, , . Le ministdre anglais est forc^, malgr^ son influence et son 
orgueil avare, de voir Dantzick passer au pouvoir de la Prusse, Bans 
reclamation ; de voir la Pologne, se partager sans sa participation ; et 
de se compromettre vis-^-vis la morale et I'esprit public de la nation 
anglaise. Aussi I'iiitrigant Pitt, qui ne peut se dissimuler que le ministre 
qui fait la guerre, traite rarement de la paix, sourtout cliez une nation 
eclairee et trompee sur cette guerre par I'astuce profonde de son gou- 
vernement, ne cesse d'invoquer sans cesse aupres de la ligne, la cause 
generale des cours. . . . 

Le comite a cherchd k reserrer le lien qui attache dej^, par les relations 
commerciales, le peuple suisse et le peuple frangais j et I'ambassadeur que 
la Suisse a regu suit constamment le vcbu temoigne par la Convention 
nationale, de s'allier avec les gouvernemens justes et les peuples libres. 

Nous apprenons que les peuples neutres et amis regoivent avec 
reconnaisance le d^cret du 1 5 avril, qui eut servi plus utilement la liberte, 
B'il eut ete d'une date plus reculee, et si le decret impolitique du 19 
decembre n'eM pas donne un nouveau pretexte k la perfidie des cours 
dtrangeres. 

Ce decret par lequel vous aviez declare que la France ne souffrirait 
jamais qu'aucune puissance semelat de sa constitution et de son gouverne- 
ment, et qu'a son tour, elle ne s'immiscerait en rien sur les autres 
gouvernemens ; ce decret a augmente subitement le nombre de nos 
partisans dans la Suisse ; et le temoignage d'un peuple simple et libre 
a son prix aupres des republicains. 

Des negociations d'alliance ne sont plus des cbimeres pour la France 
libre. II est des puissances qui ont senti que I'elevation ou la ruine 
d'une nation intdressent toutes les autres et que celles meme qui sont 
le plus 61oignees du tli^S,tre de la guerre, sont souvent les victimes 
de leur moderation ou de leur indifference. II est des allies pour 
leur propre siiret^, peuvent soutenir nos intdrets, avec autant de 
chaleur que de bonne foi. II est d'autres alliances que la politique 
doit vous assurer, et d'autres qui seront dues en grandes partie k votre 
dtat republicain ; votre commerce ne peut que s'en feliciter. 

L'ltalie voit avec interet le signe de la R^publique arbor^ dans ses 
villes, si j'excepte les villes gouvem^es encore par un pretre et par la 
maison d'Autricbe. . . . 

Nous apprenons que la Russie a fait faire k la Porte la demande 
officielle du passage d'une flotte, menagant de regarder le refus qu'on 
pourrait lui en faire comme une declaration de guerre. La reponse a 
^te dilatoire et sera negative ; les usurpations de la Russie trouveront 
enfin des bornes. C'est a la politique europeenne k aider le maitre des 
Dardanelles k les poser. . . . 

2 D 



4i8 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

TJne suite de coalisation faite centre la France, avitjet^des obstacles 
h, I'arriv^e des chebecs a Alger. On voulait encore vous aligner cette 
puissance, amie de la Republique ; mais nous recevons la nouvelle que le 
dey a regu, avec le plus vif inter^t, les deux cbebecs que la K^publique 
lui a renvoyes, et qu'il, a tdmoigne les dispositions les plus favorables k 
la France. ... 

There follows tlie French criticism of the Alien Bill. 

Un bill unfame, qui insulte k I'humanite et aux droits des nations, 
a etd promulgue par le gouvernement anglais, et traduit en espagnol k 
Madrid et dans les villes auseatiques, par les intrigues de Tambasaadeur 
anglais. Ce bill, dont la haine pour la convention a dicte les clauses 
horribles contre les Frangais, vous portera sans doute k user du droit de 
represailles. Le comit6 vous fera un rapport sur cet objet, ainsi que 
Bur les diverses mesures k prendre contre la gouvernement anglais. 
Des agens nombreux sont dsssemin^s dans 1' Europe, pour connaitre les 
complots de nos ennemis au dedans et au debora, et pour s'assurer des 
veritables amis de la republique. 

II resulte enfin, de toutes nos relations, que Dumouriez et ses aides- 
de-camp, chassis du Stoutgard, n'ont pas regu un meilleur accueil a 
Vursbourg, par ordre de I'^lectuer, quoiuqe ^veque. Ainsi, les traitres 
ne trouvent pas d'asyle m^me cbez les despotes a qui ils se sacrifient. 

Matters concerning the Interior are comparatively vague, 
for here the Committee wished to compromise with the 
Gironde ; but they are strong against civil war. 

DE L'INTI:RIEUR. 

. . . Quant aux approvisionnemens des armees et de la marine, les 
commissaires dprouvent des obstacles, en ne pouvant, d'apr^s le dernier 
decret, acbeter que dans les marches, 

Le comitd s'est occupe ensuite de sonder la plaie et de connaitre la 
source de toutes les agitations qui tourmentent la republique. 

Ici des verites doivent nous etre declarees ; car, vous ^tes sur le 
bord d'un abyme profond, et la Convention Nationale, au milieu de ses 
divisions, a oubli6 qu'elle marchait entre deux ecueils, et qu'elle etait 
conduite par I'aveugle anarchie. 

D'un c6te, I'execrable plan de la guerre civile, second^ par 1' Anglais, 
et sans doute dirigee de Londres, de Rome et par des agens correspon- 
dans a Paris, ^tandait ses ramifications sur toute la France, et priucipale- 
ment dans les pays qui etaient, dupis la revolution, inf estds de fanatisme, 
ou qui avaient it6 le theatre des troubles fanatiques et des complots 
contre-r^volutionnaires. 



APPENDIX XI 419 

D'un autre c6te, une alarme g^nerale s'est repandue parmi les pro- 
prietaires d'un territoire de yingt-sept mil le lieues quarrees, et ces 
craintes ont eu pour base des motions exager^e8,ades journaux feuil- 
lantises et des propos sauguinaires j le mecontentement ne de nos 
discussions personnelles a altdr^ la confiance, mais vous Ites neces- 
saires : les aristocrates, redoutant les passions des patriotes, ont excite 
les hommes energiques contre les moderns auxquels ils se rattaclient 
sourdement ; ils ont prepare des mouvemens contraires. . . . 

Marseille, Bordeaux, Lyon, Rouen, prenez garde, la liberte voua 
observe sur votre marche dans la revolution ; elle ne vous croira jamais 
contraire k ses vues ; mais craignez d'etre stationnaires dans le mouve- 
ment de I'opinion publique ; ecrasez avec nous les revolt^s, les anar- 
cMstes et les brigands ; mais aussi craignez le mod^rantisme et les 
intrigues de I'aristocratie qui veut vous eflfrayer sur les proprietes et sur 
le commerce, pour vous redonner des nobles, des pr^tres et un roi. . . , 

Au moment oil le comite a eti form^, presque partout les adminis- 
trations trop faibles ou trop au dessous des circonstances se ressentaient 
de I'influence meurtridre des passions particulieres qui y correspon- 
daient. . . . 

A Lyon, I'aristocratie a un foyer plus profond qu'on ne pent le 
penser ; elle est secondee par I'dgoisme et I'indifference. . . . 

Mais les campagnes et les villes de department de Ebone et Loire, 
surtout Villefranche, presente un autre esprit, et 14 surtout paraissent 
ces signes heureux, la sont entendues ces acclamations energiques qui 
caracterisent le patriotisme. 

A Marseille oil tout annonee I'ardeur r^publicaine, k Marseille oh. 
I'on voit presque k cbaque pas un arbre de la liberte ou une inscription 
civique, a Marseille oh le pain, 6gal pour tout et de mauvaise qualite, 
se vend sept sols la livre, cette calamite est supportee sans murmurer, 
oil I'on entend des plaintes contre les traitres, les egoistes, les intrigans ; 
oii les seuls malheura dont on soit afflige sont ceux qui frappent la 
Republique entiere, Marseille a eprouve des convulsions violentes ; mais 
si la repression de quelques exces de la demagogic a fait craindre a de 
bons citoyens que le moderantisme ne pr6valtit, le republicanisme n'en 
triompbera pas moins des passions individuelles. Croyons que cette 
grande cite ne degenerera pas de sa renommee. 

Nous avons a gemir sur des exces commis a Avignon et a Aix ; ce 
qui s'est passe d'irr^gulier k Toulon, relativement aux officiers de la 
marine, vous sera rapport^ quand le comite aura fait le travail de cette 
partie. 

Le meilleur esprit regne dans ce moment k Perpignan ; la vieille 
antipatbie nationale contre I'Espagnol, y recbauflfe I'esprit republicaia 
que le departement des Pyr^n6es orientales avait dijk montre avec tant 
d'energie le 21 Juin 1791. 

Bayonne se rattacbe aux bons principes. Les trabisons lui ont donnd 



420 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

de Tenergie ; mais si cette place est dans ce moment menac^e de prfes 
par I'ennemi, le z^le des republicaina meridionaux la d^fendra centre 
les ennemis du dedans et du dehors. 

Bordeaux ne cesse de fournir ^ la liberty et k ses armees des tresors 
et des soldats ; elle va defendre en meme temps les Pyrenees et les 
Deux-Sevres. 

Les intentions manifestees k Nantes ne se ressentent pas assez de 
Pentbousiasme civique qui doit animer dans ce moment tous les citoyens. 
Ses moyens auraient pu etre plus efficaces ; 11 y a du mecontentement 
et des craintes sur les effets des divisions intestines. 

A Orleans, I'esprit public s'ameliore, depuis que I'aristocratie a dte 
frappee par la loi r^volutionnaire ; mais cette ville a le droit d'obtenir 
que les procedures faites par les commissaires soient bientot jugees, lea 
coupables punis et les bons citoyens rassures. 

Dans le departement de I'Allier, une correspondance interceptee a 
fait decouvrir des traines centre la liberty, elles etaient ourdies par des 
pr^tres ddportds, de concert avec leurs agens k Moulins. Les corps ad- 
ministratifs, qui vivent dans la plus heureuse barmonie, ont mis en lieu 
de sHrete les ci-devant que leur conduite avait rendus suspects et les y 
font garder avec soin et humanite, jusqu'4 ce que la Republique n'ait plus 
rien a craindre de ses ennemis interieurs et de ces enf ans denatures. Le 
peuple a partout applaudi k cette energie de ses magistrats, et il les a 
secourus, parce que le peuple veut franchement la liberty. 

A Roanne, le moderantisme est r^duit en systeme, et dans la crise 
oti nous sommes, cette apatbie politique est le plus grand fldau de la 
Elpublique, qui ne pent s'etablir que par le developpement de toute 
I'energie nationale. 

A Tain, dans le departement de la Drome, des patriotes, que 
n'etaient qu'aises dans leur fortune (le patriotisme se trouve rarement 
avec la fortune), se sont cotis6s, et, de concert avec le Maire, ont fait, 
sans y Stre contraints par la loi, mais par amour pour la patrie, une 
cotisation, dont le produit a ^te employ^ k fournir du pain k un prix 
moder^, pour les citoyens peu fortunes. C'est ainsi que dans les pro- 
vinces meridionales, les moeurs et rhumanit^ font plus que les lois et le 
coeur des ricbes dans les grandes citds. ... 

A Tours, I'administration d'Indre et Loire, apprenant que les ennemis 
dtaient a Loudun, et marcbaient a Cbinon, a pris la resolution, par un 
mouvement civique et spontane, de se transporter toute entifere au 
milieu des dangers qui les menagaient, et decides k s'ensevelir sous les 
ruines de la ville, plut6t que de se rendre. Une commission y estrestee. 
Loudun a demeure sans defence. Quelques aristocrates en ont 6te 
, beureusement chassds. 

Poitiers, trop influence par des fanatiques et par des bommes de 
I'ancien regime, pent donner des esp6rances aux revolt§s, et dejk I'ad- 
ministration nous a fait craindre le r^sultat du mauvaia esprit d'une 



APPENDIX XI 421 

partie de ses habitans, malgre I'energie connue des patriotes qu'elle 
renferme. 

Paris qu'on accuse sans cesse, qu'on agite presque toujours, tantot 
par des crimes, tantSt par des intrigues, tant6t par des passions person- 
nelles, tantot par des interets secrets et ^t rangers, et plus souvent encore 
par Taction prolongee ou I'exaltation des passions r^volutionnaires ; 
Paris, receptacle de tant d'^trangers, de tant de conspirateurs, doit 
attirer vos regards. 

The following passage on the Commune of Paris is 
noteworthy for its non-committal character, in keeping with 
the attempt to get rid of the Gironde, if possible, without 
an insurrection. 

Vous devez contenir le conseil general de la commune de Paris dans 
les limites que I'unit^ et I'indivisibilite de la Republique exigent et que 
la loi lui prescrit. C'est h vous qu'il appartient seul de dominer toutes 
les ambitions politiques, de detruire toutes les usurpations legislatives ; 
c'est k vous de repondre 4 la France du depot de pouvoir qui vous a ete 
religieusement confie. 

Vous devez aviser aux movemens inegaux et anarcbiques que des 
intrigans font passer dans plusieurs sections peuplees de bons citoyens, 
et aux mouvemens aristocratiques qu'on pourrait cependant leur com- 
muniquer. 

Vous devez surveiller dgalement le moderantisme qui paralyse tout 
et prepare la perte de la liberty, et les exces le la demagogic dont les 
Emigres et les ambitieux, d^guisds parmi nous, tiennent le secret et le 
prix journalier. 

L'esprit des babitans de Paris est bon, malgr6 les vices de I'egoisme, 
de I'avarice et de I'apatbie d'un certain nombre de ses babitans. L'amour 
de la liberty, qu'on a voulu tant de f ois y neutraliser, sort victorieux de 
toutes les epreuves ; et nous pensons que Paris n'appartiendra jamais 
qu^' la liberty ; Paris qui a detruit le trone, ne souffrira pas qu'aucune 
autorite usurpe le pouvoir national, qui est la propri^te de tous, et qui 
est le veritable lieu de tous les departemens. 

Malgre toutes les intrigues par lesquelles on a cbercbe k emp^cber 
Paris de prononcer son patriotisme en marcbant contre les revolt^s, 
cbaque section a fourni ou s'occupe de fournir son contingent pour for- 
mer douze ou quatorze bataillons de mille hommes. . . . 

I quote certain portions which show the fear of the 
Committee, so often justified, with regard to foreign in- 
trigue. 



422 THE LIFE OF DANTON 



FINANCES. 

II a agiot^ le numeraire pour avilir I'assignat ; il a fait hausser les 
changes, par ses op6ration3 k la bourse. 

DISSENTIONS CIVILES. 

II a aliment^ le f anatisme de la Vendee ; il a fourni dea hommes, 
des armes et des munitions.^ 

KOYALISME. 

C'est I'anglais, qui a combind les regrets et raviv4 lea esp^rances, 
par I'excfes du r^publicanisme qu'il a foment^, par les motions des lois 
agraires, dont il cbercliait ensuite k faire imputer les projets k des 
patriotes connus. . . . 

g£nI:raux. 

Celui qui avait achet6 Arnold en Am^rique, a achetd Dumouriez en 
Europe, et il a dH trailer de mSme les militaires qui n'aiment pas la 
republique. . . . 

DE L'ORQANISATION SOCIALE. 

L'anglais a sem^ I'efiFroi dans I'ame des propri^taires par des motions 
sur les partages des terres, et dans le coeur des commer9ans par le pillage 
des magasins. . . . 

1 De3 traitres se sont mSl^s dans les rangs dea patriotes et dans les convois da 
I'artillerie qui allaient combattre les r6volt6s; le comit6 en a fait arr^ter la 
marche, et le comite de surveillance retient les principaux auteurs de ce nouveau 
complot. Malgr6 tant de surveillance, quelques soldats fran9ais, indignes de ce 
nom, ont trahileur devoir et sont all6s grossir la horde des rebelles. Partout les 
obstacles se multiplient ; partout les administrations veulent regler les mouve- 
mens des troupes et les commissaires veulent faire les fonctions de g^n^raux, dea 
communes arretent k leur gr^ des armes qui ont une autre destination, et c'est 
ainsi que toutes les forces s'attdnuent et que les brigands ont des succfes. 

Mais du moins les rives qui correspondent aux perfides de George III. sont 
garanties. Les trois divisions commandoes par le general Canclaux, qui occupent 
les ports intermediaires entre les Sables et Nantes, entretiennent la communica- 
tion entre ces deux villes, et contiennent les brigands k une certaine distance dea 
c6tes. 

La communication par terre, entre Nantes et Angers, est libre, on travaille k 
retablir la libre navigation de la Loire entre ces deux villes. Quelques bateaux 
armOs de canons sont prOparOs, et suffiront pour cette protection. 

D4ja une victoire signalOe vieont de raviver toutes les espOrances de la patrie. 
A Saint-Mexent, I'artillerie et les approvisionnemens des rOvoltOs sont le prix de 
la premidre victoire signalee que les patriotea viennent de remporter. 



APPENDIX XI 423 

L'anglais a imagine de la bloquer, de Taffamer, de I'incendier dans 
ses ports, dans ses edifices publics ; de d^truire son industrie ; il armd 
tour k tour I'aristocrate contre le patriote, et le patriots centre I'aristo- 
crate ; enfin, le peuple contre le peuple, esperant que le spectacle de 
nos troubles otera au peuple anglais le courage de detruire chez 
' lui le despotisme royal. 

PERTE DE PAEIS. 

C'est au coeur que les assassins frappent ; c'est sur les capitales que 
les conquerans dirigent leurs coups. On ne pouvait perdre Paris par 
les arm^s ; ou a voulu perdre Paris par les d^partemens ; on y a seme 
des terreurs pour le ruiner par la f uite des proprietaires et des riches ; 
on a seme des idees de supr6matie, pour separer, pour isoler les d^parte- 
mens de Paris, 

The danger of civil war and vigorous metliods for 
meeting it are tlie subject of tLe passages that follow. 



DIVISION DU TERRITOIRE. 

L'anglais enfin a espere diviser la France pour la morceler ou la 
ruiner. Dans son delire, il a espere de voir une monarchic impuissante 
s'etablir dans le nord, et des republiques miserables et divisees se former 
dans le midi. 

J'ai devoil^ le gouvernement britannique ; il n'est plus k craindre. 

Dans un trfes grand nombre de departemens on a procedd k la 
reclusion des personnes notoirement suspectes d'incivisme et soupgon- 
n^es dentretenir des intelligences avec les emigres et les contre- 
r6volutionnaires. On en accuse generalement les pretres et les moines, 
les emigres rentres impunement sur notre territoire, et les correspondant 
qui les soutenaient de leurs fortunes et de leurs esp^rances. 

On a dH prendre des mesures s^veres, alors que tous les aristocrates 
correspondaient a la Vendee, et que des lettres interceptees annongaient 
un rassemblement k Nantes. 

Des arrestations nombreuses ont dd etre la suite de ces mefiances, 
de ces trabisons disseminees dans toute la France ; l'autorit6, dans les 
temps de revolution, a plus d'yeux et de bras que d'entrailles ; mais le 
legislateur doit a tous les citoyens cette justice exacte qui vient regu- 
lariser les premiers mouvemens et faire statuer sur la liberte indivi- 
duelle avec les precautions que les circonstances peuvent admettre. 
Vous devez abattre egalement toutes les aristocraties et toutes les 
tyrannies ; vous devez approuver vos commissaires s'ils ont bien fait, 



424 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

les blamer et les punir s'ils out vioM les droits des citoyens. Le comite 
pense que le comit^ de legislation et de siiretd g^n^rale doivent pro- 
poser incessamment une loi qui rfegle le mode de jugement de la 
l^gitimitd de ces arrestations, et qui renvoie aux tribunaux les 
coupables ou laissat en r6clusion ceux qui ne sont que notoirement 
suspects. 

Les d^partement de I'Ain voit I'esprit public se r^tablir parmises 
habitans. 

La conspiration qui a ^clatd dans I'Ouest semblait se montrer dans 
les departemens de I'Ardfecbe, du Gard, de la Haute Loire et du Cantal ; 
mais les administrateurs et vos commissaires sont parvenus k les re- 
primer. Ces troubles de la Lozfere ont un caractere plus fort ; mais le 
patriotisme de ce departement et de ses voisins y mettra bientot un 
terme. 

Les tribunaux ont sdvi contre les coupables ; nous avions craint que 
vos commissaires n'eussent d^pass^ leurs pouvoirs dans le departement 
de I'Ardfecbe, et nous les aurions defere k votre s^vfere justice pour 
donner I'exemple de la punition de ceux qu'on affecte d'appeler des 
proconsuls, pour empecber le bien qu'ils peuvent faire ou en em- 
poisonner les resultats ; mais un d^cret avait dejk mis hors de la loi 
les coupables complices de Defaillant. 

La trabison de Dumouriez que tout annonce avoir en des brancbes 
trfes etendus, a it6 un trait de lumifere ; elle a frapp^ es administra- 
tions et les citoyens d'un coup 61ectrique. Tons nos moyens ont 
centuple par cet ^vfenement destind k les paralyser ; mais de tous les 
maux prepares insensiblement dans les departemens frontiferes comma 
dans le centre, comme au milieu de nous le plus grand, le plus effray- 
ant par ses progres, est la marche imprevue des contre-revolutionnaires 
nobiliares, sacerdotaux et emigres qui, du fond de la Vendee et du 
Morbihan remontent la Loire, menacent nos cites de rint^rieur, et 
emploient k la fois, des moyens de terreur et de persuasion. . . , 

Les r^volt^s ont plusieurs corps de rassemblement. Le principa 
qui s'etait porte k Tbouars, dtait, suivant les uns, de quinze mille 
suivant la dernifere relation envoyee par un de nos commissaires, il 
etait de vingt k vingt-cinq mille bommes armds, partie de piques, 
partie de fusils ; ils trainent avec eux, treize pieces de canon, selon 
les uns, et d'aprfes le dernier succ^s de Tbouars, trente pieces 
d'artillerie. 

lis sont commandes par des ci-devant nobles et accompagnes par 
des prStres ; toutes leurs femmes leur servent d'espions ; ils se battent 
pour des fiefs et des prieres. Les agriculteurs fanatiques combattent 
avec fureur et ne pillent pas ; ils composent la moitie de la troupe. 

Un quart est compose de gardes-cbasses, d'ecbappds des galeres et 
de faux sauniers. lis pillent, devastent, egorgent, et sont bien dignes 
de leurs cbefs. 



APPENDIX XI 425 

L'autre quart est forme d'b.ommes piisillanimes ou indifferens, 
que la violence force de marclier, mais qui, 5, la premifere defaite des 
brigands, se retireraient, et forment, pour ainsi dire, la propriety du 
premier occupant. C'est k la liberte de s'en emparer par des succes. 

II n'y a que les emigres, les ci-devant, et les pretres qui voudraient 
mettre de I'ordre dans les rassemblemens, et de la^ tactique dans cette 
guerre. lis paient, les rebelles deux tiers en numeraire. 

Les cbefs connus sont les ci-devant de Leseur, Larocbe-Jacquelin, 
Beauchamp, Langreniere, Delbecq, Baudr^-de-Brocbin, Debouill6-Loret, 
un abbe appele Lariviere. Domenge est colonel-general de la cavalerie ; 
Demenens et Delbecq commandent I'arm^e catbolique-royale. 

Le comite a pourvu journellement par des arretes pressans, k ce que 
cette guerre intestine ftit efiicacement comprimee. . . . 

Deja I'armee s'organise a Tours ; une commission centrale est 
^tablie k Saumur ; dej^ des troupes de ligne ont depasse Paris pour s'y 
rendre, et le renfort considerable que le comitd avait requis, est en 
route pour s'y rendre. Les voitures des ricbes, les dquipages du luxe, 
auront du moins servi une fois k la defense de la patrie et de la liberty. 
Une armee est dirigee en poste sur les rives de la Loire. C'est ainsi 
qu'un des plus fameux guerrieurs du nord alia ^eraser en 1757 les 
autrichiens k la bataille de Liffa ou Leuten, avec une arm^e ariv^e en 
poste sur le cbamp de bataille. . . . 

Le comite prepare un rapport sur les agens periodiques de I'opinion 
publique, et sur les arr§tes violateurs de la liberty de la presse. 

Tel est le tableau de I'interieur de la republique, d'apres les 
rapports et la correspondance des commissaires et des corps adminis- 
tratifs. Nous devons le terminer par une reflexion sur les commis- 
saires, dont on chercbe trop k eflfrayer les citoyens, et m§me plusieura 
membres de la convention. . . . 

The influence of Cambon is apparent in what foUows. 

DES CONTRIBUTIONS PUBLIQUES. 

Quant aux contributions, rien ne prouve mieux le d^sir de voir 
fonder la Rdpublique, et de voir renaltre I'ordre social le paiement des 
impositioni, an milieu des mines et de debris de I'ancien gouvernement ; 
e'il y a de Tarri^re, ce n'est que par les fautes des administrations qui 
n'ont pas encore termini la confection des r61es ; quelques-unes ont 
arrStd tout envoi de finds. Mais un moyen de salut public, appartient 
k cette partie de I'administration, c'est de vous occuper sans relacbe, 
des lois concemant les contributions publiques, de I'accdldration de la 
vente des Mens d' Emigres, et des maisons ci-devant royales, objeta qui 
semblent encore attendre leurs anciens et coupables possesseursj et 
des moyens de retirer de la circulation, une certaine masse d'assiguats. 



426 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Voiis devez cette loi au peuple, qui a vu s'augmenter par une pro- 
gression effrayante et ruineuse, le prix des subsistances ; vous le devez 
a tous les creanciers de la Republique et h. tous ceux qu'elle salarie, 
afin de retablir la balance rompu trop rapidement, par la masse enorme 
de cette monnaie. La portion du peuple qui merite avant toutes les 
autres I'attention de ses representants, est celle qui souffre tous les 
jours au surbaussement du prix des denrees. 

Les contributions indirectes, pergues au milieu des mouvemens de 
la revolution, et des defiances semees sur son succfes, par des mecontens 
et des ennemis pnblics, alimentent abondamment le tr^sor national, 
Deji dans les trois derniers mois de Janvier, Fevrier et Mars, la per- 
ception des impots indirects excfede de plusieurs millions I'estimation 
qui en a ete faite. Le total des trois mois, se porte a 52,182,468 livres 
en J comprenant 5,400,000 livres, de 1' adjudication des bois. Que 
serace dans un temps de paix et de prosperite ? Quelle confiance la 
Eepublique doit avoir de ses forces et de ses moyens ? 

Nous avons vu avec regret, parmi les produits de I'imposition 
indirecte, des droits qui devraient etre inconnus k des peuples libres, 
des droits de bttardise et de ddsberence, et que les sauvages de 
TAm^rique repousseraient. 

From henceforward Danton's liand is apparent through- 
out the report. Some matters on the Constitution and on 
PubHc Construction, which have little to do with the insur- 
rection of June 2nd, have been omitted, but the Dantonian 
policy of framing a constitution which should reconcile 
enemies is printed in full. 

DES COLONIES. 

Nous ne disons encore rien des colonies, quoique nous ayons regu 
des memoires et des vues sur cet objet important et malheureux, 
d'oii depend la prosperite publique, et I'agrandissement de lamarine 
frangaise. Peut-Stre etit-il mieux valu de ne pas plus parler dans 
dans les assemblees nationales, des colonies que de la religion, jusqu'4 
ce que la revolution du continent eiit ete ^ son terme. Perfectionner 
dans ces contrees lointaines le commissariat civil, adoucir les effets 
du regime militaire, detruire insensiblement le pr6juge des couleurs, 
ameliorer par des vues sages et des moyens progressifs le sort de 
I'espece humaine dans ces climats avares, etait pent- etre la mesure 
la plus convenable ; mais la revolution a fait des progres terribles sous 
ce soleil briilant. Saint-Domingue est aussi malheureux que les ties 
des vents sont redevenues fidfeles, et ses malbeurs ne paraissent pa3 
rfes de leur terme. 



APPENDIX XI 427 

On examinera un jour s'il est des moyens de rattacher les colonies 
k la France, par leur propre int^ret, c'est-^-dire, par la franchise 
absolue de leur commerce avec nous, et une disposition gendrale des 
droits perQus sur le commerce etranger, dans ces memes colonies. De 
pareilles lois qui nous def endraient mieux que des escadres, demandant 
d'etre meditees. 

Cette partie de I'int^rSt national, doit etre traitee s^pardment et 
avec une forte sagesse ; le comit6 est charge de preparer en attendant 
ce rapport, des mesures propre k diminuer les maux que cette belle 
colonic souflfre encore. 

DE LA FORCE PUBLIQUE DE L'NTi^RIEUR. 

EUe se ressent partout de I'anarcliie que regne. L^, elle ddlibfere ; 
ici, elle agit au gre des passions. Dissemin^e dans toutes les sections 
de I'empire, elle semble avoir une versatility de principes et d'actions, 
qui peut affrayer la liberte. Dans une ville, les citoyens riches et les 
6goistes, se font remplacer ; defendre ses foyers, semble §tre encore 
une cornee plutot qu'un honneur, une charge plut6t qu'un droit. Dans 
une autre cite, le service public frappe des artisans pen aises ou des 
ouvriers, qui ont besoin du repos de la nuit, pour le travail qui 
alimente leur famille, il est plus que temps d'effacer ces lignes de 
demarcation intolerable dans un regime libre. La nature seule a 
decrit des differences ; elle est dans les fi,ges ; les jeunes citoyens 
depuis seize ans jusqu4 25, sont les premiers que la patrie appelle ; 
moins occup^s et plus disponibles, c'est k eui de voler aux premiers 
dangers. Cette premiere force est-elle insuffisante (car il ne faut pas 
penser a la defection) 1' autre age plus fort et plus sage, pr^sente a la 
societe ses moyens, c'est I'age de 25 ^ 35 ; la troisifeme classe sera de 
35 i 45 ; la dernifere requisition doit f rapper tout ce qui peut porter 
les armes. Alors, la societe appelle k son secours, tous ceux qui parta- 
gent la souverainet^ ; une exception favorable se pr^sente pour les 
peres nourrissant leur famille du produit de leur travail. Une 
exception contraire doit f rapper les cdlibataires et les hommes veufs 
sans enfans. 

C'est k la legislation et a la morale a fletrir ceux qui ne paient cette 
dette ni a la nature ni a la Republique. 

C'est ainsi qu'il convient aux Frangais, d'organiser le droit de 
requisition. Cet eiemple est sorti des besoins de la liberty, dans lea 
terres am^ricaines. La requisition est I'appel de la patrie aux 
citoyens ; cet appel peut etre fait par les generaux, quand la loi 
le leur a confie momentanement, et dans les cas de guerre ; cet appel 
peut §tre fait par le pouvoir civil dans toutes les autorites constituees, 
et encore plus par les assemblees nationales, qui sont k la fois pouvoir 
civil, l^gislatif et national. 



428 THE LIFE OF DANTON 

Le comity a pense qu'il devait presenter un mode uniforme, de 
r^quferir la force public dans toutes les parties de la E^publique, et 
de la part de toutes les autorites, afin que cliaque fonctionnaire et 
chaque citoyen, connaisse I'^tendue de son pouvoir ou de son obliga- 
tion. . . . 

D'ailleurs, on trouverait plusieurs avantages k borner ainsi la con- 
stitution aux articles necessaires. 

(1*') Une plus grande e8p6rance qu'elle sera acceptee par le peuple. 

(2°) Une plus grande esp^rance encore que les citoyens ne deman- 
deront point si promptement, une r^forme de la constitution. 

(3°) On d^truirait par cette seule resolution, meme avant que la 
constitution Mt faite, une partie des esperances de nos ennemis, parce 
qu'alors, ils commenceraient k croire que la Convention donnera une 
constitution k la France, ce que jusqu'^ present ils ne croient pas. 

En effet, il est difficile de ce tromper dans des articles generaux 
importants, sur ce qui convient veritablement a la nation fran§aise, et 
I'on n'a pas k craindre ces difficultds, cette presqu' impossibilite d'ex^cu- 
tion qui, si on se livre aux details, pourraient faire desirer la reforme 
d'une constitution, d'ailleurs bien combin^e. 

On pourrait done proposer de borner la constitution k ces articles 
essentiels, dans le nombre desquels on sent que doit §tre compris le 
mode de reformer la constitution, lorsqu'elle cessera de paraitre, k la 
majorite des citoyens, suffisante pour le maintien de leurs droits ; et si 
I'assemblee adoptait cet avis, elle cliargerait quatre ou cinq de ses 
membres, adjoints au comite de salut public de lui presenter un plan 
de constitution, borne k ces seuls articles, et combing de manifere que 
ces articles puissent etre soumis immediatement k la discussion, 

Le travail de ce comite ne prendrait qu'une semaine, et I'assemblee 
pourrait suivre ses discussions sur la constitution, car rien ne serait 
plus facile que de placer dans ce plan, les points Mjk arret^s par la 
Convention. 

Ce travail meme serait utile, quand mSme I'assemblee voudrait se 
livrer ensuite k plus de ddtails : 

(I*') Parcequ'il en resulterait un meUleur ordre de discussions ; 

(2°) Parce qu'on aurait toujours alors, un moyen d'acceldrer le 
travail, selon que des circonstances imp6rieuses I'exigeraient. C'est 
d'aprfes cette id6e simple que nous vous proposerons de decreter que la 
Convention charge une commission, composee de cinq de ses membres, 
adjoints au comite de salut public, de lui presenter dans le plus court 
delai, un plan de constitution, reduit aux seuls article qu'il importe de 
rendre irrevocables par les assemblies legislatives, pour assurer k la 
R§publique son unit^, son indivisibilit6 et sa liberty, et au peuple 
I'exercice de tous ses droits. 

Reprenons done avec Constance le travail de la constitution, et dis- 
cutona-en le petit nombre d'articles vraiment constitutionnels, avec cette 



APPENDIX XI 



429 



sagesse qui n'exclut pas I'energie, et avec ce talent qui ne fletrisse pas 
les defiances. 

Songez que le dernier article de la constitution sera le commence- 
ment du traite de paix avec les puissances. '\ leur tarde de savoir 
avec qui elles peuvent traiter, quelle que soit la forme de notre 
gouvernement. . . . 

There follows a strong attack upon the Federal idea, 
showing the Committee to be definitely anti-Girondin in 
its sociology. 

Mais cette inscription sera-t-elle done toujours mensong^re ? verra- 
t-on sans cesse, dans le palais de I'unite, les fureurs de la discorde, et 
44 mille petites republiques y agitant leurs dissentions par des repre- 
sentans? . . . 

II faut qu'k votre voix, tons les Frangais se prononcent, que 
I'egoiste et I'avare soient fl^tris par I'opinion, et punis dans leurs 
ri chesses. Ne vous y meprenez pas, il n'y a plus de gloire et de 
bonlieur pour vous, que dans le succes de la liberte, dans le r^tablisse- 
ment de I'ordre, et dans I'affermissement des propri6tes. 

Voila la base de toutes les societes politiques, et le l^gislateur 
qui la meconnaitra, sera en horreur k ses contemporains et a la 
posterity. 

II sera aussi execrd le legislateur qui aura meconnu les droits du 
peuple, et qui n'aura pas ecout6 la plainte des malbeureux. 

Si vous perdez cette occasion d'6tablir la republique, vous ^tes tous 
^galement fletris, et pas un de vous n'echappera aux tyrans victorieui, 
quelle que soit la nuance de votre opinion on le principe de vos actions. 
Le glaive exterminateur frappera les appelans au peuple, et les votana 
pour la inort du tyran ; et c'est la seule egalit^ que vous aurez fondee. 
Vos noms ne passeront k la posterity que comme ceux des rebelles et 
des coupables : vous aurez reculd le perfectionnement des societes 
humaines ; vous aurez perdu les droits des peuples, vous aurez fait 
perir 300 mille Lommes, et dilapide des tresors que la liberte avait 
deposes dans vos mains pour son affermissement ; vous aurez rdtro- 
grader la raison publique ; vous serez complice de la tyrannie des rois 
et de la barbarie de I'Europe, et Ton dira de vous ; la convention de 
France pouvait donner la liberte k I'Europe, mais par ses dissentions, 
elle riva les feres du peuple, et servit le despotisms par ses haines. . . . 



INDEX 



Agriculture, depression of, be- 
fore Revolution, i6. 
Amelinau case, Danton's opinion in, 

Si- 
Antoinette, Marie, see "Marie 

Antoinette." 

Arcis-sur-Aube, Danton born at, 
in 1 759, 40; position of, 40; 
effect on Danton's politics, 42 ; 
visited by Danton in 1791, 148; 
again in August 1792, 166; last 
retirement of Danton to, 237. 

Army, condition of, at Valmy, 192 ; 
Danton's first mission to, 199 ; 
second mission, 204 ; third, 209 ; 
position of on Sambre in June 
1793, 297 ; of " Sambre et Meuse," 
298 ; attitude towards Robes- 
pierre, 299, 300. 

Arnault, witness of Danton's death, 
278. 

Arrest of D'Eglantine, 246 ; of 
Hubert, 247 ; of Desmoulins and 
Danton, 248, 249. 

Artisans, loss of influence of Church 
on, 21 ; their disfranchisement, 
22 ; causes of their discontent, the 
guild, the octroi, 20; character 
of before Revolution, numbers, 
influence of, 19. 

Assembly, National, see "States 
General." 

Bailly, of the professional class, 
24; opposition of Cordeliers to, 
82 ; elected mayor of Paris, 112 ; 
resignation of, 152. 

Barbarian invasions of ninth cen- 
tury, 13. 

Barentin, de, intimacy with Dan- 
ton, 51, 60. 

Barrfere, a Bourgeois, 23 ; his action 
on first committee with Danton, 
220 ; Report against Robespierre, 
305. 306. 



Bastille, fall of, 73-74 ; effei 
this, 78-80. 

Battles, of Valmy, 192, 193 
Jemappes, 196; Neerwinden, 
Turcoign, 293 ; Fleurus, 29S 

Belgium, Danton proposes am 
tion of, 204. 

Bourgeoisie or middle class, ( 
of Revolution on, definitioi 
22, 23 ; produces most of 
revolutionaries, 23. 

Brienne, de, client of Danton's, ^ . 

Brissot, draws up petition of Jaco- 
bins, 146 ; attacked by Desmou- 
lins, 226. 

Brunswick, Duke of, his manifesto, 
161-166; his hesitation, 177. 

Burning at stake in United States, 
5 ; by Parliament of Strasbourg 
in 1789, s. 

Cahiers, their nature, 62, 63 ; that 
of Cordeliers destroyed, 63. 

Carnot, a Bourgeois, 23 ; in first 
Committee of Public Safety, 210 ; 
Robespierre's attack on, 304. 

Centralisation, of pre-revolutionary 
France, 10 ; quality of, 10 ; be- 
fore Revolution, examples of, 
16 ; pre-revolutionary fails to 
raise revenue, 26 ; used as a 
practical engine of reform, rapid 
raising of armies, 28. 

Charlemagne, marks the end of 
settled Roman order, 12 ; Im- 
perial tradition of in France, 1 5. 

Charleroy, stronghold of Coburg, 
297 ; captured, 298. 

Charpentier, his Caf^ des Ecoles ; 
52 ; his daughter marries Dan- 
ton, Mile., see " Wife." 

ChS,telet, impossibility of reform- 
ing it, 7 ; nature of, 98 ; issue 
warrant against Marat, 99 ; 
against Danton, 107. 



INDEX 



431 



Church, its loss of power in villages 
during eighteenth century, 17 ; 
loss of influence over citizens, 
21 ; not main cause of egalitar- 
ian feeling in France, 32 ; inten- 
tion of making Danton a priest 
in, 44. 

Cic^, de, Danton as orator of muni- 
cipal deputation demands resig- 
nation of, 129, 131. 

Civil constitution of clergy, see 
"Clergy." 

Class system, vigour of, before 
Revolution, 16. 

Classes, social, five principal, before 
Revolution, 16. 

Clergy, Danton's defence of, 198 ; 
civil constitution of, 118; its vast 
importance, 119, 120; its details, 
121 ; passes the Assembly, 122 ; 
Louis ratifies, 123. 

Coburg, his position on Sambre, 
297 ; is defeated at Fleurus, 298. 

Collot d'Herbois, attacked by Dan- 
ton in Jacobins, 136; beaten by 
Danton in election for Substitute 
Procureur, 152. 

Committee of Public Safety, first, 
proposed by Isnard, Danton 
elected, 210 ; determines over- 
throw of Girondins, 223 ; Danton 
resigns from, 234; Robespierre 
elected on, 234; powerful force 
in winter of 1793, 240; deter- 
mination to continue Terror in 
spite of Danton, 240 ; abandons 
Robespierre, 301. 

Commune (before August 1792, see 
" Municipality "), insurrection- 
ary of, August 1792, 161 ; in- 
creases in power, 172 ; Marat 
joins its "Comit^ de Surveill- 
ance," 183 ; its quarrel with 
Gironde, 216-228; opposes com- 
mittee in winter 01^ 1793, 240 ; 
attacked by Danton, 243 ; cap- 
tured by Robespierre, 293 ; at- 
tempts to save him and fails, 
310-314. 

Condorcet, of the professional class, 
24 ; example of balance of two 
French tendencies, 27 ; demands 
Republic, 141, 142. 

Conseils du Roi, Old Court of 
Appeals, nature of, 48 ; Danton 
enters at Bar of, 49. 



Contrat social, written just after 
Danton's birth, 41. 

Convention, elections of Paris to, 
Danton elected to, 188 ; its 
parties, 189 ; its appearance on 
first meeting, 190 ; declares 
Republic, 191 ; debate on king's 
death in, 201, 202; votes arrest 
of Girondins, 202 ; Legendre 
defends Danton in, 253 ; St. Just 
attacks Danton in, 254, 255 ; 
subservience to Robespierre, 296 ; 
outlaws him, 307-310. 

Cordeliers, district of, social char- 
acter, 64 ; position of Convent 
Hall in, 65 ; meets after elections, 
importance of this, 69 ; petitions 
against Danton's arrest, 108 ; 
merged in section of Th^Mre 
Francais, 112. 

Cordeliers, club of, contrasted with 
Jacobins, 80 ; their numbers and 
character, 81 ; opposition to new 
municipality, 82 ; determine on 
independent use of their guard, 
83 ; attack municipality again, 
88, 89 ; create Mandat Imperatif, 
89 ; manifesto to march on 
Versailles, 91 ; oppose Lafayette's 
discipline in National Guard, 93 ; 
oath of their deputies, 94 ; victory 
of club over municipality, 96; 
campaign against restriction of 
suffrage, 110-113 ; Danton leaves 
them for Jacobins, 135 ; Republi- 
can declaration of, on king's flight, 
142 ; petition of, on king's fliyht, 
not signed by Danton, 146. 

Cordelier, Vieux, published by 
Desmoulins to protest against 
Terror, 244. 

Court, relations of nobles to, 24 ; 
form party to influence king at 
Versailles, 85, 86 ; last stand in 
the Tuilleries, 167, 168. 

Courts of Law, before Revolution, 
48. 

Couthon, a Bourgeois, 23 ; proposes 
law on worship of God, 290; 
supports Robespierre in com- 
mittee, 303. 

Dannon, his name mistaken for 
Danton's, Le Gallois's misprint, 
Michelet's error based on this, 
200, 201. 



432 



INDEX 



Danton, a Bourgeois, 23 ; very 
typical of nation, his attitude 
towards Paris, 36 ; liis rise during 
the war, 37 ; preliminary sum- 
mary of his career, 35-39 ; fore- 
runner of Napoleon, 38 ; retire- 
ment and death, 39; horn at 
Arcis-sur-Auhe, 1759, age com- 
pared with contemporaries, 40 ; 
effect of birthplace on his 
politics, 42 ; his father Pro- 
cureur at Arcis, 42-43 ; family 
of, house of, social position of 
father, death of father, fortune 
of, his mother and aunts, 43 ; to 
he made a priest, 44 ; educated 
by Oratorians, their influence, 
destined for Bar, 45 ; character 
as boy, 46 ; coronation of Louis 
XVI. seen by, 46-47 ; his step- 
father Recordain, apprenticed to 
Vinot, solicitor in Paris, called 
to Bar at Rheims, 47 ; practice 
in lower courts, 48 ; at bar of 
Conseils du Roi, 49 ; his Latin 
oration, 50 ; his opinion in Mont- 
barey case, Du Barrentin his 
client, and De Brienne, his 
income at Bar, 51 ; frequents 
Charpentier's CafI des Ecoles, 
marriage, dowry of wife, 52 ; 
physical appearance, 53 ; energy, 
style of oratory, knowledge of 
English and Italian, 54 ; reading, 
pre - revolutionary politics, 55 ; 
private life, 56 ; goes to live in 
Courdu Commerce, 59; Barentin's 
offer of post to, 60 ; his relation 
to masonic lodges, 65 ; summary 
of his condition on outbreak of 
Revolution, 56-67 ; Primary of 
his District convened, 68 ; not 
president of District during 
elections, 69 ; at Palais Royal, 
71 ; possibly present at fall of 
Bastille, 74 ; action night after, 
clashes with Lafayette, 75 ; in 
Club of Cordeliers, 81 ; as Presi- 
dent of Cordeliers attacks Muni- 
cipality, 88 ; creates Mandat 
Imperatif, 89 ; placards mani- 
festo for march on Versailles, 
91 ; nature of action supporting 
Mandat Jmperatif, 95 ; his 
success, 96; elected to muni- 
cipality, 97 J defends Marat, loi- 



107 ; discovers error in "warrant 
against Marat, 102; appeals to 
assembly, 103 ; false effect of 
his attitude, 104-105 ; sworn in 
to municipality, 105 ; with 
Legendre, 106 ; goes in deputa- 
tion to Louis XVI, , 106 ; warrant 
for arrest of, issued by ChS,telet, 
107 ; district in his favour, 108 ; 
his proposition for grand jury, 
appeal to Assembly, decision in 
his favour, 109; his policy at 
close of 1790, 123-125 ; rejected 
at municipal elections of 1790, 
125 ; moderation during affair of 
Nancy, 126; rejected as candi- 
date for Notables, 127 ; orator of 
city deputation (November 1790), 
128-131 ; elected head of his 
battalion, 131 ; elected to ad- 
ministration of city (1791), 132; 
letter to De la Rochefoucauld, 
134; appears in Jacobins, 135; 
attacks Collet d'Halois in 
Jacobins, 136 ; speech on death 
of Mirabeau, 137 ; action on 
AprU 18, 1 791, Desmoulins' 
testimony untrustworthy, 138; 
attitude during Louis XVI. 's 
flight, 140-141 ; attacks Lafayette 
at Jacobins on king's flight, 
143-145 ; reads Jacobin petition 
on Champ de Mars, absence 
from Cordeliers' manifestation 
there, 147 ; Lafayette orders 
aiTest of (August 4, 1791), 148; 
his flight to England, 148-149 ; 
his return, sent by his section to 
electoral college, 149 ; attempted 
arrest of, 150; elected substitute 
to Procureur of Paris (November 
1791). 152; his chances of a 
prosperous municipal career, 
155; opposes war policy, 156; 
speech at Jacobins describing 
himself, 157 ; justice of his 
opposition to war, 158 ; retained 
on committee of insurrection 
(July-August, 1792), 161 ; goes 
to Arcis to see his mother, 166 ; 
leads insurrection of August 10, 
167 ; his position after loth of 
August, Minister of Justice, 172; 
his determination to form a 
strong government after fall of 
monarchy, only practical man in 



INDEX 



433 



executive in August, 1792, 173 ; 
addresses Assembly as Minister 
of Justice, his circular to tribu- 
nals, 175; defence of himself in 
the circular, his power over 
cabinet, 176 ; he and Dumouriez 
see chance of repelling invasion, 
177 ; his interview with Roland 
and ministers on news of invasion 
reported by Fabre d'Eglaiitine, 
1 80-1 8 1 ; his political attitude 
just before massacres, 182 ; he 
orders domicUiary visits and 
collection of arms, 183 ; his 
speech, the volunteers, its suc- 
cess, 184; why he did not interfere 
during massacres, 185 ; anecdote 
of him during massacres, his 
future comment on, 186 ; elected 
to Convention by Paris, 188 ; 
his false position in the Moun- 
tain, accused of planning 
massacres, 189; his appearance 
on first meeting of Convention, 
190 ; resigns Ministry of Justice, 
191 ; repudiates Marat, 192 ; his 
diplomacy secures Prussian re- 
treat after Valmy, 194 ; his atti- 
tude towards Dumouriez, partial 
reconciliation with Gironde, 195 ; 
anecdote of theatre and Madame 
Roland, of meeting with Marat, 
196; his reticence after Jemappes, 
197 ; speech on Catholicism op- 
posing Cambon, 198 ; attempt to 
reconcile Girondins in meeting 
at Sceaux, Guadet's opposition, 
198-199 ; starts on his first mis- 
sion to army, 199; debates on 
Louis XVI. 's death, misprint of 
Danton for Dannon, 200; what 
he reaUy did in the debate, 201 ; 
unusual violence, 202 ; caused 
by his wife's illness, 203 ; inti- 
macy with Priestley, Talleyrand, 
his diplomacy spoiled by his own 
violence on king's death, de- 
mands annexation of Belgium, 
204 ; second mission to army in 
Belgium, change of his politics 
on his return, despairs of re- 
conciling Girondins and Paris, 
205; accounted for by death of 
his wife, 206 ; his military policy 
and appeal to Paris, 207 ; creates 
Revolutionary Tribunal, 208 ; 



violently attacked for his inti- 
macy with Dumouriez, 209 ; 
supports Isnard's proposal of 
Great Committee, is named on it, 
210; compared with Mirabeau, 
213; summary of Danton's posi- 
tion in Committee, as it changes, 
215 ; his practical policy impos- 
sible with Girondins, 217 ; diffi- 
culty of following his action 
in April and May, 1793, speech 
on acquittal of Marat, 218, 219 ; 
curious action half in favour of 
Girondins, proposes committee 
of twelve through Barrere, 220^; 
but prevents formation of special 
guard, 221 ; Danton, through 
the Committee, overthrows the 
Gironde, 226 ; his phrase with 
regard to Girondins, 227 ; his 
difficulty in controlling forces 
after June 2, 1793, 228 ; begins 
to lose his power, 229 ; still 
retains enough power at end of 
June to produce Constitution, 
230 ; and to persuade Convention 
to his policy, his second marriage, 
231 ; reasons for it, he loses 
power still more in July, 232 ; 
puts his name reluctantly to 
St. Just's report attacking 
fallen Girondins, he resigns his 
place on Committee, 234 ; his 
brilliancy whilst standing alone, 
great speeches in August, on 
army, on strengthening govern- 
ment, 235 ; his despair and ill- 
ness, Garat's interview with him, 
Desmoulins, 236 ; retires to his 
home at Arcis, 237 ; his rest at 
Arcis, its effects, 237-240 ; regi-et 
for execution of Girondins, re- 
turns to the Convention, 239 ; 
his new politics against the 
Terror, 241, 242 ; his defence of 
religious liberty and attack on 
Commune, 243 ; Robespierre de- 
fends him in Jacobins, Desmou- 
lins helps him, publication of 
" Vieux Cordelier," 244-245 ; his 
first check, D'Eglantine arrested, 
he knows his attempt has failed, 

246 ; still speaks in Convention, 
last interview with Robespierre, 

247 ; Panis comes to warn him, 
he is arrested, 248 ; his trial 

2 E 



434 



INDEX 



and death, 249-281 ; taken to the 
Luxembourg with Desmoulins, 
meets Paine, 249; policy of his 
defence, of Committee, 251, 252 ; 
Legendre defends Danton in 
Convention, 243; St. Just's re- 
port and vote against Danton, 
254-255 ; his remarks in the 
prison, 250, 257, 258; trial be- 
gins, 259 ; fear of an armed 
attempt to save him, his reply 
to the judges, 261 ; charges 
against Danton, 262 ; Wester- 
mann's replies, 263 ; Danton's 
speech in his own defence, 264, 
265, 266 ; collusion of judge and 
prosecutor, 267 ; H^rault's de- 
fence, 268 ; judge and prose- 
cutor appeal to Convention, 269 ; 
St. Just's second speech to 
Convention against Danton, 270 ; 
Billand ■ Varennis, 271; taken 
back to Conciergerie, condemned, 
his action in prison, 272 ; passage 
to guillotine, 273-279 ; passes 
David, 275 ; passes house of 
Duplay and Robespierre's win- 
dow, 276 ; he rallies Fabre 
d'Eglantine, 277 ; rhymes sold 
in Paris same night, 278 ; his 
execution, 279-281 ; effects of his 
death, 282, 283, 284 ; contrasted 
with Robespierre, 285. 
Danton, Madame, see " Wife." 
David, artist, portrait of Danton 
{frontispiece), animosity against 
Danton, 271 ; sketches the con- 
demned, 27 s ; false promise to 
Robespierre, 307. 
De Barentin, see " Barentin." 
De Brienne, see " Brienne." 
De Cic6, see "Cic4" 
D'Eglantine, see " Fabre." 
De S^chelles, see "H^rault," 
Decree of Dec. 1788, elections, 61. 
Desmoulins, Camille, house in Cour 
du Commerce, 59 : brings news 
of Necker's dismissal, 73 ; mem- 
ber of Cordeliers, 81 ; testimony 
as to Danton's action on April 
18, 1791, 138 ; Danton sleeps in 
his flat before insurrection of 
Aug. 10, 1792, 167 ; his "Histoire 
des Brissottins," allied to Robes- 
pierre, 226 ; publishes " Vieux 
Cordelier," 244; arrested, 249; 



his answer to his judges, 261 ; 
his examination in court, 268 ; 
tears up his written defence, 271 ; 
his frenzy going to guillotine, 
275, 276 ; his death, 279. 

Districts, Paris divided into sixty, 
64. 

District of Cordeliers, see " Corde- 
liers." 

Duke of Brunswick, see "Bruns- 
wick." 

Dumouriez, outflanked before 
Valmy, 192 ; fears to attack, 
193 ; his political motives, his 
work with Danton after Valmy, 
I94> 195 ; incident in theatre with 
Danton, 195, 196 ; treason of, 
209 ; Danton attacked for friend- 
ship with, 209, 210. 

Education, French, effect of, due 
to Jesuits, 45 ; effect of on Robes- 
pierre and Desmoulins, 46 ; of 
Danton, 44-47. 

Egalit^ elected for Paris, 188. 

Eglantine, d', see " Fabre." 

Elections to. States General decreed, 
61 ; to first municipality, elected 
by Cordeliers, 88 ; of priests and 
bishops, 121 ; to Legislative, 150; 
of Paris to Convention, 18S ; of 
Danton, Bailly, &c., see under 
their names. 

England, Danton's flight to, 148, 
149. 

English constitution, flexibility of, 
6 ; its vices described by Marat, 
104. 

English language, Danton's ac- 
quaintance with, 54, 249. 

English society, homogeneity of in 
eighteenth century contrasted 
with the Continent, 73. 

Fabre D'EGLANTiNE,poet, member 
of Cordeliers, 81 ; escorts officers 
of Ch§,telet through mob, 103 ; 
reports Danton's interview with 
otherministers, 180, 181 ; arrested, 
246 ; trial of with Danton, 249- 
272 ; his luxury in prison, 272 ; 
his illness and despair on way to 
guillotine, 274, 275 ; his "Maltese 
orange," 276 ; rhymes on him and 
Danton, 278. 

Fear, see " Great." 



INDEX 



435 



Feudalism, founded in troubles of 
ninth century, 13 ; fall of, in 
July, August, 1789, 83-85. 

Feuiliants, club of, represents 
Lafayette's supporters in Legis- 
lative, 151. 

Flanders, regiment of, arrives to 
strengthen court in 1789, 90. 

Fleurus, battle of, 298. 

Fouquier-Tinville, public prose- 
cutor, his action in Danton's 
trial, 267-271. 

France, centraKsation of, before 
Revolution, 10; egalitarianismin, 
is not due to Roman law or 
Church, 32 ; material state of, 
prior to Revolution, 10 ; before 
Revolution, character of centrali- 
sation in, 11; imperial tradition 
in, 16 ; origins of social constitu- 
tion in, 12 ; specially suited to 
growth of Roman laAV, 15 ; Paris 
the bond of, 31 ; re-made by the 
Revolution, 35 ; effectof Rousseau 
upon, 28, 29 ; united by mon- 
archy, led by Paris as the king's 
town, 33. 

Fran9ais, ThdS,tre, see " Section." 

Franchise, loss of, by artisans, 21, 
22. 

French, character of, in pursuing 
political theories, 26, 27, 28, 29 ; 
courts of law, nature in Ancienne 
Regime, 48 ; education, effect of 
Jesuit influence on, 45 ; educa- 
tion, effect of on Robespierre and 
Desmoulins, Danton's speech on, 
46 ; peasantry, owners of land 
before Revolution, 18; peasantry, 
effect of Revolution on, 18 ; 
peasantry, condition before Re- 
volution, 17; village community, 
decay of, in eighteenth century, 
18 ; loss of Church in, 17 ; nobility, 
origin of, as a definite class in 
ninth century, 13. 

French Revolution, see "Revolu- 
tion." 

Garat, his interview with Danton, 
236, 237. 

Garran Coulon, Danton's return 
from England on election of, 149. 

Girondins, represent the profes- 
sional class, 24; declare war, 
15-18; opposition to Danton 



from the beginning of the Con- 
vention, 192 ; momentary recon- 
ciliation with, 195, 196 ; failure 
of, meeting at ISceaux, Guadet 
rejects him, 199 ; outbreak of 
quarrel with Paris, 208 ; expul- 
sion of, 216-228; description of 
their character, excess of ideal- 
ism, unworkable with Danton's 
practical policy, 217 ; their mis- 
government, opposition of Paris, 
218; bad news from Vendee 
weakens them in May 1793, 219 ; 
Isuard's menace to Paris, 212; 
firmness during attack, Lan- 
juinais' proposal to "break the 
Commune," 221 ; vote of the 
twenty-nine arrests, 222 ; con- 
fusion of their fall to be explained 
by great Committee, 223 ; Dan- 
ton's phrase concerning, 227 ; 
Vergniaud and Guadet attacked 
in St. Just's report, 234 ; Danton's 
pity for, 236, 239. 

Gobel, schismatic Bishop of Paris, 
trial under Robespierre, 291. 

Great fear, peasants' rising destroys 
feudality, 83, 84. 

Guadet, Girondin, rejects Danton 
at Sceaux, 199 ; St. Just's report 
on, 234. 

Guard, National, see "National 
Guard." 

Guard, Swiss, their defence of the 
Tuilleries, 166-169 ; demand for 
vengeance against, by Parisians, 
179; special, proposed for the 
Convention, 191 ; weak demand 
for, by Girondins, 220. 

HUBERT, member of the Cordeliers, 
81; his character, 220; with 
Commune against Committee in 
winter, 1793, 240; Danton's op- 
position to his religious perse- 
cution, 243 ; his arrest and 
execution, 247. 

Henriot, illegally given command 
of the city forces by the Com- 
mune, 219 ; at head of attack of 
Convention, 221, 222; note sent 
to, by Committee on Danton's 
trial, to prevent a rescue, 261 ; 
attempt to save Robespierre, 31 1. 

H^rault de Sechelles, present at 
taldng of Bastille, 74 ; added to 



436 



INDEX 



Committee, 229; expelled from 

Committee, 247 ; trial of, 268, 269 ; 

his death, 279. 
Herbois, d', Collot, see " Collot." 
Herman, judge at Dan ton's trial, 

260-271, 

Income, of Danton at Bar, esti- 
mated, 51. 

Institution, the, importance of, to 
France, 211, 213; provided by 
the Committee, 214. 

Insurrection, of July 14,1789,72,74; 
of August 10, 1792, 166, 170; of 
June 2, 1793, 221, 222 ; attempted 
to save Robespierre, 311, 313. 

Invasions, siege of Verdun by 
Brunswick, 177 ; Beaurepaire's 
suicide, capitulation of Verdun, 
ferment in Paris, 178 ; causes 
massacre of September, 180 ; 
Valmy, 192, 193; Jemappes, 
196 ; defeat of Neerwinden, 
1793) allies cross the Rhine, 
Alps, and Pyrenees, take Valen- 
ciennes, 233 ; Turcoign, 293 ; 
battle of Fleurus, 298. 

Isnard, Girondin, proposes Com- 
mittee of Public Safety, 210 ; his 
threat to destroy Paris, 221. 

Jacobins, character of, 135 ; Dan- 
ton's speech in, on death of 
Mirabeau, 137 ; Danton attacks 
Lafayette in, 143, 145 ; moderate 
petition of, to Assembly on 
king's flight, 146 ; read by Dan- 
ton in Champs de Mars, 147 ; 
joined by radicals in Legislative, 
151; debate on vrar, 155, 156; 
Robespierre reads his last speech 
in, 307 ; Legendre closes, 312. 

Jemappes, battle of, 196. 

Judge, in Danton's trial, see " Her- 
man." 

Just, St., see «' St. Just." 

Justice, Ministry of, Danton put 
into, 172; his circular from, 175, 
176. 

Kersaint, associated with Danton 
at period of the flight of the 
king, present at interview of 
Danton with other ministers in 
August, 1793, he believes that 
Brunswick will reach Paris, 181. 

King, see " Louis." 



Lafayette, a seceding noble, 25 ; 
first clash with Danton, 75 ; op- 
position of Cordeliers to, 82 ; 
follows the mob to Versailles, 
91 ; his discipline of National 
Guard opposed by Cordeliers, 93 ; 
sends National Guard to arrest 
Marat, loi ; attacked by Danton 
on flight of the king, 143, 145 ; 
his accusation of Danton's ven- 
ality, 145 ; his massacre of the 
Champs de Mars, 147 ; again 
attacked by Danton, 159 ; 
threatens civil war, 160. 

Law, Roman, twelfth century, re- 
naissance of, study of, rise of the 
universities, 14. 

Courts in France, Conseils du 

Roi, 48. 

Lawyers, action of, in preventing 
reform, 4 ; become conservative 
as a body, 18. 

Legendre, a Bourgeois, 25 ; a 
member of the Cordeliers, 81 ; 
defends Danton before the Con- 
vention, 243 ; shuts the Jacobins, 
312. 

Legislative, elections to, 150; re- 
conciliation with monarchy, 150, 
151 ; parties in, 151 ; Lafayette's 
letter to, 159 ; receives the Royal 
Family, 168 ; quarrels with Com- 
mune just before massacres, 183; 
Danton's great speech in, 184; 
close of, 188. 

Louis XVI., age of, compared with 
Danton, 40 ; his coronation seen 
by Danton, 46 ; his attitude to 
Assembly, 85 ; his character, 86 ; 
brought back to Paris from Ver- 
sailles by mob, 91 ; his attitude 
after this, 92 ; thanks presented 
to, by Danton, 106 ; accepts Civil 
Constitution of clergy, 123 ; lost 
by death of Mirabeau, 137; his 
attempt to go to St. Cloud, 137 ; 
effect of his flight, 139, 140 ; de- 
pends on success of August 10 to 
receive allies, 168 ; takes refuge 
in Parliament, 168 ; his secret 
payments, 1 79 ; execution of, 
202 ; effect of, on America, 203. 

Mandat Imperatif, 89, 95. 

head of National Guard, his 

death, 167. 



INDEX 



437 



Manifesto of Brunswick, see "Bruns- 
wick." 

Manor or village community alone 
survives ninth centuiy, 13 ; its 
survival and power, 14. 

Manorial relations, their decay, 5. 

Manuel, Danton's chief in munici- 
pality of 1 791, 153. 

Marat, a Bourgeois, 23 ; incident 
of, 97-104 ; his character, 98 ; 
warrant for arrest of, 99 ; Na- 
tional Guard sent to arrest, 100 ; 
importance of issues involved, 
Lafayette's action, loi ; defended 
by Danton at Bar of Assembly, 
103 ; his escape, 104 ; elected to 
•' Comity de Surveillance " before 
massacres, 183 ; puts Roland on 
his Hst of proscribed, 187 ; his 
appearance in the Convention, 
192 ; accused by Girondins, ac- 
quitted, 218; stabbed by Char- 
lotte Corday, growth of TeiTor, 

, 233- 

Marie Antoinette, age of compared 
with Danton, 40 ; forms a court 
party against the Parliament, 
85 ; power over Louis after Mira- 
beau's death, 137; her deter- 
mination to hold the Tuilleries, 
167 ; she alone realises the 
fall of the monarchy, 169 ; 
effect of her death on Dan- 
ton, 241 ; her shocking trial and 
its influence on Danton, 242, 

Marseillais, their march on Paris, 
160. 

Marseillaise, 160. 

Massacres of September, 178, 187 ; 
precipitated by Montmorin's ac- 
quittal, 179 ; refusal of National 
Guard to interfere, 180; Danton 
keeps Ministers at their posts 
just before, 181 ; the Comity de 
Surveillance joined by Marat, 
183; begin at the Carmes, 184; 
causes of Danton's neutrality 
during, 185-187 ; close of the 
massacres, 188 ; effect of on 
politics, 189. 

Medieval Reform, continuity of, 
3 ; failure of after fifteenth cen- 
tnry, 4. 

Middle class, see "Bourgeoisie." 

Mirabeau, age of compared with 
Danton, 40; calls August 4 



"an orgy," 84; his reasons for 
supporting the "Civil Constitu- 
tion of the clergy," 121 ; death 
of, 136 ; Danton's sympathy 
with, and speech on death of, 
137 ; compared with Danton, 213. 

Monarchy, French, causes Paris to 
become head of towns, realises 
national unity, 33 ; character of 
just before Revolution, 11; 
clogged by local survivals, 12 ; 
election of Hugh Capet, 14 ; 
examples of pre-revolutionary 
centralisation in, 16 ; gradually 
ceases to be national, 15 ; origins 
of its action, 12 ; reaches power 
through local institutions, 15 ; 
why it could not reform, 12 ; 
Danton's attitude towards in 
crisis of the king's flight, 140- 
145; the fall of, 169, 170; im- 
portance of, evident after fall, 
171. 

Montmorin, evidence of Danton's 
venality quoted by Lafayette in 
Memoirs, really a receipt for 
Danton's reimbursement, 145. 

Lucien de, acquittal of, hurries 

on massacres of September, 179, 
180. 

Mountain, party of Paris in the 
Convention, Danton's false posi- 
tion in, 189 ; appearance of 
members of, 190; attacked by 
Robespierre, 300. 

Municipal, system of France, 32, 
33 ; Revolution, 79. 

Municipality, of Paris, first insur- 
rectionary, 76 ; its weakness, 77 ; 
reconstitution of, 87, 88 ; quarrel 
with Cordeliers, 93-97, 110-113; 
Danton elected to, 105-106 ; 
Bailly elected mayor of, 124; 
petitions against ministers, 129- 
131 ; insurrectionary Commune 
plot against, 161 ; dissolved by 
insurrectionary Commune, 166 ; 
(after Aug. lo, 1792, see "Com- 
mune"). 

Nancy, affair of, Danton's mode- 
rate action, 126. 

Nationality, differentiation of, in 
ninth century, 13. 

National Guard, formed, 77 ; La- 
fayette's plan of, S3; Danton 



438 



INDEX 



elected head of his battalion, 131 ; 
clash with people, 126; divided 
on April 18, 137; fire on 
people in Champ de Mars, 147 ; 
divided on Aug. 10, 160 ; Santerre 
put at head of by Danton, 167; 
refuse to interfere with mas- 
sacres, 187 ; Henriot succeeds 
Boulanger at head of, 219 ; 
attack Convention, 221, 222 ; do 
not rise for Robespierre, 213. 

Necker, position of, in 1789, his 
dismissal, 73. 

Nobles, origin of, as a definite 
class in France in ninth century, 
13 ; great numbers of, definition, 
relation to court, place in Re- 
volution, 24 ; poverty of, did not 
at first oppose reform, 25 ; why 
they could not rule France, 32. 

Notables, Danton rejected as 
candidate for, 127. 

Octroi, effect on artisans, 20. 
Oratorians, educated principal 

revolutionaries, 45, 
Osselin, his courage after Mont- 

morin's acquittal, 180, 

Paine, named in Committee v(dth 
Danton, 197 ; meets Danton in 
prison, 249, 

Panis, warns Danton before his 
arrest, 248. 

Paris, the bond of France, 31 ; 
cause of headship, effect of Re- 
volution on, 30, 31 ; head of 
urban system because seat of 
monarchy, 33 ; makes Danton's 
career, 58 ; first elections in, 69 ; 
solidarity of, in early Revolution, 
70 ; provisional government dur- 
ing attack on Bastille, 76 ; 
organises National Guard, 77 ; 
model of municipal movement 
in France, 79 ; restriction of 
suffrage in, no; restrained by 
Assembly, in ; Bailly elected 
mayor of, 112; effect of muni- 
cipal system on, 114; petitions 
for dismissal of ministers, 129 ; 
effect of king's flight on, 141 ; 
Potion, elected mayor of, 152 ; 
anger at first disasters of war, 
158 ; effect of Brunswick's mani- 
festo on, 161 ; ferment on news 



of invasion, 178 ; clamours 
against arrested monarchists, 
1 79 ; Danton will not oppose, 
182 ; anarchy in, during mas- 
sacres, 187 ; elections to the Con- 
vention in, 188 ; eulogy of by 
Danton, 191 ; anger against 
Girondins, 208 ; conflict of, with 
Girondins, 217 ; Isnard's threats 
against, 221 ; used by Committee 
to expel the Gironde, 223 ; re- 
fuses to rise for Robespierre, 313. 

Parliaipient of Paris, nature of, 48, 

Parliaments (representative), see 
"States General," "Legislative," 
" Convention." 

Peasantry, French, condition of, 
before Revolution, 17 ; owner- 
ship of land by, before the Re- 
volution, 18; effect of Revolu- 
tion on, 18. 

Potion, elected mayor of Paris, 
152 ; unable to interfere with 
the massacres, 187 ; gets some 
hold on the city at their close, 
188; attempt of Danton to get 
him elected for Paris, 189 ; 
named on Committee with Dan- 
ton, 197. 

Petition, of municipality against 
ministers, 109 ; of Jacobins on 
king's flight, 146 ; of Cordeliers, 
147 ; Pitt, his reforms, 6. 

Priestley, Danton's relations with, 
149, 204. 

Procureur, definition of the office 
in the old regime, 42, 43 ; of 
Paris, during Revolution, 153 ; 
Danton elected substitute to, 
152. 

Professional class, its character, 
numbers, constitution, 24. 

Recordain, stepfather of Danton, 

47. 

Reform, mediaeval, continuity of, 
3 ; action of lawyers in prevent- 
ing failure of, after fifteenth 
century, 4 ; Pitt's attempt at, 6 ; 
impossibility on Continent, 7 ; 
impossible to French monarchy, 
12 ; its rapidity helped by cen- 
tralisation, 28. 

Religions liberty, Danton's speech 
in favour of, 243. 

Republic, not originated by Dan- 



INDEX 



439 



ton, 140; demanded "by Condorcet, 
141, 142 ; declared by Convention, 
181. 

Revolution, French, nature of, i, 
2 ; necessity for, on Continent, 
7 ; its violence, 8 ; questions 
raised by, 9 ; material causes of, 
10; main causes not economic, 
II ; classes it dealt with, 16; it 
revives religion in villages, 17 ; 
effect on peasantry, 18; on arti- 
sans, 19, 20, 21 ; on Bourgeois, 
22 ; on professionals and nobles, 
24 ; theory of, 26 ; effect of 
Rousseau on, 28, 29 ; place of 
Paris in, 30 ; summary of politics 
at outset of, 34 ; its task, the 
re-creation of France, 35 ; two 
periods of, 117, 118 ; transforma- 
tion of, in 1790, 114, 123; sum- 
mary of its results, 314-318. 

Revolutionary Tribunal, created by 
Danton, 208 ; Marat acquitted 
by, 2i8 ; Hubert tried by, 245 ; 
Danton tried by, 249-272 ; en- 
slaved by Robespierre, 295. 

Robespierre, a Bourgeois, 23 ; age 
of, 40 ; effect of education on, 46 ; 
joins Committee of Public Safety, 
234 ; his position in winter of 
I793> clash with Danton, 241 ; 
last interview with Danton, 247 ; 
speaks against Danton in Con- 
vention, 253 ; demonstration of 
condemned before his house, 276 ; 
his character, 285 ; his aims, 286 ; 
his misreading of Rousseau, 287 ; 
causes of his ascendency, 288- 
290 ; abandons Danton's diplo- 
macy, 292; heads feast of Supreme 
Being, 294 ; proposes virtual abo- 
lition of trials, 295 ; destroys in- 
dependence of Convention, 296 ; 
attacks Mountain, 300 ; aban- 
doned by Committee, 301 ; causes 
of his fall, 302-304 ; his last 
speech, 306-307 ; outlawed by 
Convention, 309-310; his last 
rally and execution, 310-314. 

Roland, a professional, 24 ; Dan- 
ton's power over, in August 1792, 
interview with, in garden of 
ministry, 180-181 ; calls on San- 
terre to stop the massacres, 187 ; 
prosecuted, 222. 

Madame, her hatred for Dan- 



ton, 176 ; she rejects his over- 
tures to Girondins, 196. 

Roman Law, its fundamental ideas 
of ownership and sovereignty, 
14 ; suited to France, 15 ; not 
main cause of egalitarian feeling 
in France, 32. 

Rome, transformation of her sys- 
tem in ninth centuiy, 12 ; the 
origin of French urban system, 
32. 

Rousseau, his effect on France, 28, 
29 ; his genius and deficiencies, 
29 ; his faith the source of his 
power, essentially a reactionary, 
29, 30 ; Robespierre's view of his 
system, 286, 287. 

Rousselin, our authority for Dan- 
ton's boyhood, 46. 

Saint Just, age of, compared with 
Danton, 40 ; joins great Com- 
mittee, 229 ; report on Girondins, 
234 ; speech against Danton, 
254-255 ; second speech against 
Danton, 270 ; proposal for bring- 
ing prisoners to Paris, 292 ; with 
army on Sambre, 297 ; fails to 
warn Robespierre, 299 ; outlawed 
with Robespierre, 310 ; joins 
Robespierre at Hotel de Ville, 
312. 

St. Priest, his dismissal demanded 
by Paris, 128-131. 

Santerre, a Bourgeois, 23 ; in the 
attack on Tuilleries, 161, 167; 
fails to call out National Guard 
during massacres, 187. 

Sections, replace districts of Paris, 
forty-eight in number, 112; Dan- 
ton demands force to be raised 
from, 207 ; convened by Robes- 
pierrians in Thermidor, 311. 

Section du Th^S,tre Francais, re- 
places Cordeliers, 112; battalion 
of, Danton elected commander, 
131 ; of Mauconseil begins agi- 
tation against ministry, 129 ; 
begin insurrection of August 
1792, 161. 

September, see " Massacres of." 

Social divisions, five principal, 
before Revolution, 10. 

Stake, burning at, in United States, 
by Parliament of Strasbourg in 
1789, 5. 



44 o 



INDEX 



states General (or National 
Assembly), term Assembly lirst 
used, 26 ; elections to, in Paris, 
68 ; reaction against, in early 
1789, 72 ; success of, after fall of 
Bastille, 78 ; night of August 4 
in, 85 ; queen forms party 
against, political attitude of Louis 
towards, 85 ; plotted against, by 
court, 90 ; come to Paris, 91 ; 
appealed to, in Marat incident, 
103 ; action to restrain Paris, 
III; establish Civil Constitution 
of clergy, 120-123 ; debate on 
petition of Paris, 130-132 ; in- 
decision of, on king's flight, 146. 

Suffrage, see " Franchise." 

Talleyrand, Danton meets, at 
municipality, writes letter to 
Louis, 138; connected with 
Danton's diplomacy, opposes 
Chauvelin in London, 204. 

Taxes, failure of, before Revolution, 
26. 

Thermidor, attempted insurrection 
to save Robespierre in, 310- 

Tour du Pin, La, dismissal de- 
manded, 128-131. 



Towns, nuclei of France, 36 ; con- 
dition of small, 46. 
Turcoign, battle of, 283. 

Vergniaud, orator of Girondins, 
understands Danton, 192 ; present 
at incident in theatre, 196 ; his 
simile in king's trial, 202 ; ex- 
planation of his vote, 203 ; his 
oratory, 217 ; prosecuted by Con- 
vention, 222 ; St. Just's report 
against, 234 ; Danton's regret for, 
242. 

Versailles, Cordeliers' manifesto for 
march on, 91 ; king brought back 
to Paris from, 91. 

Village community, French, decay 
of, loss of religion in, 17. 

Viuot, solicitor in Paris, Danton 
apprenticed to, 47. 

Wife, of Danton,^r5i5(Charpentier) 
married, his devotion to her, 52 ; 
her illness and its effect on 
Danton, 201, 203 ; her death, its 
effect on Danton, he exhumes 
her body, 206; second (G^ly) 
married, 232. 

Young, Arthur, his comments on 
pre-revolutionary France, 10. 



THE END 



.BU'25 



